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WEBSTER CENTENNIAL, 



A DISCOURSE 



DELIVERED ON THE 



HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY 



OF THE BIRTH OF 



DANIEL WEBSTER, 



JAN'UARV i8. 1882. 



BY 

The Rev. HENRY N. HUDSON, LL.D. 



-(>0>®<00- 



^7^7'^> 



BOSTON: 
PUBLISHED BY GINN, HEATH, & CO. 

1882. 



9h 






Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1882, by 

HENRY N. HUDSON, 
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



GiNN, Heath, & Co. : 
J. S. Gushing, Printer, 16 Hawley Street, 
Boston. 



TO THE 

Saat-Blifijjltt mnXf, 

OF BOSTON, AN ASSOCIATION KNIT AND HELD TOGETHER 
IN MEMORY AND REVERENCE OF 

DANIEL WEBSTER, 

THE FOLLOWING DISCOURSE IS RESPECTFULLY 
INSCRIBED BY THE 

AUTHOR. 
Cambridge, Jan. i8, 1882. 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 



-»o»- 



LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: One hundred years 
y ago to-day, a very quiet but vastly fruitful event took 
place up in New Hampshire : it was the birth of Daniel 
Webster. The City of Boston and the State of Massachu- 
setts had this great man in the councils of the Nation nearly 
twenty-eiglit years ; and I think I may safely say that, from 
his presence and services there, they have reaped more of 
honour and of solid benefit than from all the other men they 
have had in that place during the last two generations put 
together. Such being the case, I had hoped that Boston 
would remember her illustrious citizen, her peerless states- 
man, and make some fitting commemoration of the day. 
She has not seen fit to do so ; and this is one reason 
why I have undertaken to do what I can, to manifest a 
becoming respect for the hundredth anniversary of Daniel 
Webster's birth. I fear, indeed, that Boston has not yet 
fully recovered from that old disease under which she turned 
away from her greatest and loveliest man, this too in his 
gray-haired age, and even "struck him with her tongue, 
most serpent-like, upon the very heart." In earlier days, she 
seems indeed to have understood and appreciated Webster 
pretty well ; yet I was much taken, some years ago, with a 
remark made to me by the late Judge Redfield, that " Boston 
never could get water enough together to float him." 

5 



6 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

The theme I am to speak upon is one that lies very near 
my heart, this too both as an American and as a man ; and 
I propose to utter my thoughts with considerable plainness 
and freedom. For, in truth, I have no popularity to lose, 
and do not care to make any ; that being a tiling I have 
no use for, nor should known what to do with, if I had it. 

As Americans, we have a right to be proud, we ought to 
be proud, it will do us good to be proud, of Daniel Webster. 
He is the one imperial intellect of our nation ; altogether the 
greatest and most catholic mind this country has produced. 
In fact, he is not so properly one man as a multitude of men, 
rather say, a multitudinous man; the varied powers, that are 
commonly dispersed among other men, being massed and 
consolidated in him. He stands second to none of our 
lawyers ; and his arguments in the Supreme Court of the 
United States probably did more than those of any other 
one man, except Chief Justice Marshall, towards establishing 
the principles and the practice of our national Constitution. 

But Webster is something more than our greatest man : 
he is one of the world's great men. Sage and venerable 
Harvard, on mature consideration no doubt, has spoken him 
for one of the seven great orators of the world. x\t the 
theatre end of her superb Memorial Hall, which has the form 
of a semicircular polygon, in as many gablets or niches rising 
above the cornice, the seven heads, of gigantic size, stand 
forth to public view. First, of course, is Demosthenes the 
Greek ; second, also of course, Cicero the Roman ; third, 
Saint John Chrysostom, an Asiatic Greek, born about the 
middle of the fourth century ; fourth, Jaques Benigne Bos- 
suet, the great French divine and author, contemporary with 
Louis the Fourteenth ; fifth, William Pitt the elder, Earl of 
Chatham, an Englishman ; sixth, Edmund Burke, an Irish- 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. / 

man, probably the greatest genius of them all, though not 
the greatest orator ; seventh, Daniel Webster. How authen- 
tic the likenesses may be, I cannot say, except in the case 
of Webster : here the likeness is true ; and, to my sense, 
Webster's head is the finest of the seven, unless that of Bos- 
suet may be set down as its peer. 

In the world's volume of illustrious statesmen also, Web- 
ster's name may justly hold up its head among the highest ; 
very few men having, in this capacity, done so much for the 
political order and welfare of mankind. As an author, again, 
he stands very near, if not in, the foremost rank of English 
classics ; some of his speeches, like those of Burke, holding 
much the same relative place in what may be termed delib- 
erative and argumentative discourse, as Paradise Lost holds 
in epic poetry, AVordsworth's Ode on Ljimortality and his Ode 
to Duty in lyrical poetry, and Shakespeare's four great trage- 
dies in the sphere of dramatic art. But what, in this regard, 
should make Webster especially dear and venerable to us is, 
that he stands unquestionably at the head of our American 
classics, and is perhaps the only one of our authors that will 
live and be studied in future times : I hope indeed that 
Bryant will so live also, and two or three others, but am far 
from sure of it. For he must be a mighty tall man, I can 
tell you, whose head touches the classic summit. 

It seems to me that a great deal too much stress is apt to 
be laid nowadays, at least among us, on the matter of style : 
for a good style is not to be reached by making it a para- 
mount aim : in that case the style becomes too self-con- 
scious, thinks quite too much of itself; whereas the proper 
virtue of style lies in its being kept altogether subordinate to 
something else. And so the prime secret of a good style in 
writing is, that words be used purely in their representative 



8 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

character, or as standing for things, and not at all for their 
own sake. This it is that so highly distinguishes Webster's 
style, — the best yet written on this continent. His language 
is so transparent, that in reading him one seldom thinks of 
it, and can hardly see it. In fact, the proper character 
of his style is perfect, consummate manliness ; in which 
quality I make bold to affirm that he has no superior in 
the whole range of Englisli prose authorship : even Burke's 
style, though richer and more varied, is hardly equal to his 
in this supreme quality. And Webster, in his Autobiogra- 
phy, touches the secret of this. '•' While in college," says 
he, '•' I delivered two or three occasional addresses, which 
were published. I trust they are forgotten : they were in 
very bad taste. I had not then learned that all true power 
in writing is in the idea, not in the style ; an error into 
which the Ars rhetoric a, as it is usually taught, might easily 
lead stronger heads than mine." 

But Webster was not only a gi-eat lawyer, a great orator, 
a great statesman, a great author, a mighty discourser : he 
was emphatically a great man, — great in intellect, great in 
eloquence, great in soul, great in character, and in all the 
proper correspondences of greatness. Mr. Whipple, in 
the admirable essay prefixed to his selection of Webster's 
speeches, aptly and felicitously applies to him the phrase, 
''colossal manhood." I really do not know of any other 
single phrase that fits the subject so well. Those who often 
heard Webster in familiar conversation, if any such survive, 
will probably tell us they never heard any one else who 
approached him in that respect. On such occasions he 
not seldom had the Bible for his theme ; and those who 
listened to his talk thereon could hardly choose but believe 
that either the Bible was inspired or else the speaker was. 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 9 

But, in "the talk that man holds with week-day man," his 
greatness was so tempered with sweetness and amiabihty, 
and with the finer and softer graces of eloquence, that one 
naturally lost the sense of it. For he had no airs of supe- 
riority ; would chat with the humblest as with a brother or 
a friend. And I have it from those who knew him long and 
well, that intimacy never wore off the impression of his great- 
ness : on the contrary, none could get so near him, or stay 
near him so long, but that he still kept growing upon them. 
A test that few men indeed can stand ! But he had some- 
thing better than all this : he was as lovely in disposition as 
he was great in mind : a larger, warmer, manlier heart, 
a heart more alive with tenderness and all the gentle affec- 
tions, was never lodged in a human breast. Of this I could 
give many telling and touching proofs from his private his- 
tory, if time would permit. It has been worthily noted how 
a litde child, on entering a room where Webster was seated, 
and looking up into his great eyes, as these grew soft and 
mellow and sweet at the vision, would run, instinctively, 
into his arms and nestle in his bosom, as if yearning to get 
as near as possible to that great, tender heart. So that I 
make no scruple of regarding Daniel Webster as the crown- 
ing illustration of our American manhood. 

In the higher elements of oratory, I find, or seem to find, 
a close resemblance between Webster and Burke. Both are 
consummate masters of rhetoric ; yet the rhetoric of both 
is generally charged to the utmost with energy of thought : 
no hollowness here ; no " sweet smoke " ; nothing of mere 
surface-splendour ; all is as solid as marble. Many of Web- 
ster's strains in this kind have been long and often used for 
exercise in declamation ; but this has only proved that no 
frequency of reading or hearing can wear the freshness and 



lO WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

verdure out of them. And, in the line of parliamentary elo- 
quence, nearly every thing else produced in this country 
seems to me tame and flat beside Webster's ; while Burke's 
has wellnigh spoilt for me all else in the language except 
Webster's. 

In the common principles of all social and civil order, 
Burke is no doubt our best and wisest teacher. In handling 
the particular questions of his time, he always involves those 
principles, and brings them to their practical bearings, where 
they most " come home to the business and bosoms of men." 
And his pages are everywhere bright with the highest and 
purest political morality. Webster, also, is abundantly at 
home in those common principles : his giant grasp wields 
them with the ease and grace of habitual mastery : there- 
withal he is by far the ablest and clearest expounder we have 
of what may be termed the specialties of our American 
political system. So that we can hardly touch any point of 
our National State, but that he will approve himself at once 
our wisest and our pleasantest teacher. In fact, I hardly 
know which to commend most, his political wisdom, his 
ponderous logic, the perfect manliness of his style, or the 
high-souled enthusiasm which generally animates and tones 
his discourse ; the latter qualities being no less useful to 
inspire the student with a noble patriotic ardour than the 
former to arm him with sound and fruitful instruction. 

I am not unmindful tliat, in thus placing Webster along- 
side of Burke, I may be inviting upon him a trial something 
too severe. I do not indeed regard him as the peer of 
Burke ; but it is my deliberate judgment that he comes nearer 
to Burke, and can better stand a fair comparison with him, 
than any other English-speaking statesman. In pure force 
of intellect, Burke fnay be something ahead of him, and is 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. II 

far beyond him in strength and richness of imagination ; for 
he was, as Johnson described him, emphatically " a constel- 
lation " : on the other hand, Bm'ke's tempestuous sensibility 
sometimes whirled him into exorbitancies, where Webster's 
cooler temperament and more balanced make-up would 
probably have held him firm in his propriety. And Webster, 
though far above imitating any man, abounds in marks of a 
very close and diligent study of Burke. It seems specially 
noteworthy, that he was thoroughly at one with Burke in an 
intense aversion to political metaphysics, and to those specu- 
lative abstractions which, if attempted to be carried into the 
practical work of government, can never do any thing but 
mischief. 

This reminds me to say something of the distinguished 
Southerner who was so long associated with Webster in our 
national councils. — John Caldwell Calhoun was a very able 
man, — a man, too, of most pure and honourable character ; 
a perfect gentleman indeed, as Webster also was. And the 
two men had a profound respect for each other. Webster 
admired the genius of Calhoun, and honoured him for his 
high personal worth. Many a hard pounding, indeed, they 
gave each other in the national Senate ; but their hard 
poundings were always so marked with bland and good- 
natured dignity, that no ill feeling ever sprang up between 
them : each had indeed, and felt that he had, in the other a 
foeman worthy of his steel ; and their official intercourse may 
be justly set down as a model of senatorial courtesy. But 
Calhoun, it seems to me, was rather a great political meta- 
physician than a statesman, in the right sense of the term. 
In the latter part of his life at least, he was much given to 
refining among political abstractions, where all sorts of im- 
practicable theories may easily be knocked together, and as 



12 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL, 

easily knocked to pieces. Herein Webster differed from 
him in ioto ; and would never go along at all with the noble 
Southerner in those speculative intricacies where men " find 
no end, in wandering mazes lost." For one of his prime 
characteristics was a large, healthy, vigorous, unfailing com- 
mon sense, which always withheld him from extremes and 
onesidedness, and kept him from undertaking to upset or 
overrule experience and fact by dint of fine-spun political 
theories. He was indeed a very monarch of common 
sense ; in which respect he probably surpassed Burke. 
And this, I take it, comes pretty near being the sovereign 
element of great statesmanship. — Strange, by the way, that 
the thing should be called common sense, while in reality it 
is one of the most uncommon things in the world. But 
then, though extremely rare in possession, it is very common 
in recognition : in fact, nearly all men feel it, though few 
men have it. 

Accordingly in a speech delivered on the 2 2d of March, 
1838, Webster, after referring to certain questions wherein 
Calhoun had quite shifted off from his old ground, has the 
following : " The honourable member now takes these ques- 
tions with him into the upper heights of metaphysics, into the 
region of those refinements and subtile arguments virhich he 
rejected with so much decision in 181 7. He quits his old 
ground of common sense, experience, and the general under- 
standing of the country, for a flight among theories and 
ethereal abstractions." I must add, that Calhoun, by his 
course in this respect, probably did a good deal more than 
any other one man in tlie country towards hatching and 
breeding the enormous mischief of our late civil war. It is 
said that '' whom the gods would destroy they first make 
mad " ; and I can hardly conceive a surer way of drawing 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 1 3 

men into suicidal madness than by fascinating them with 
metaphysical subtilties and abstraction-mongering. 

It is, then, full time that Webster should be reinstated in 
the place he held some thirty-five years ago in the minds 
and hearts of the American people. He is as great now as 
he was then, for time gnaws no breaches in workmanship so 
solid as his ; and his wise counsels are as applicable and 
as needful in all the leading national questions of this day 
as they were when his great living voice was heard amongst 
us. We cannot afford to forget him, or to leave his elo- 
quence and wisdom out of our mental feeding. For the 
same high lessons, the same sacred inspirations, are needed 
still ; as much so, perhaps, as when his patriotic ardour and 
his ponderous logic knocked the brains out of Nullification 
and Secession in the halls of Congress. For these reasons, 
and sundry others, I was heartily glad when, in 1879, ^ 
choice selection of his speeches, edited, and well edited 
too, by Mr. Edwin Percy ^Vhipple, of this city, was given 
to the public in a form much more accessible to the people 
generally than ever before. Surely the people of this nation 
cannot do a better thing for themselves and their children 
than to cherish the name and memory of Daniel Webster 
among their dearest household treasures ; and this not only 
as the fairest outcome of American genius and manhood, 
but as their wisest and most attractive teacher in all that is 
or should be nearest their hearts as citizens of this great 
and free Republic. 

As it is now nearly thirty years since Webster died, I may 
safely presume that many of you, perhaps most of you, 
never heard or saw him. I will therefore endeavour to give 
some personal description of the man. I saw him a great 



14 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

many times, and heard him repeatedly ; and you may be 
sure my eyes and ears were seldom idle or wandering when 
they had him in view. He was indeed incomparably the 
finest-looking, rather say the grandest-looking, man I ever 
set eyes on : I doubt whether, in personal appearance, his 
peer was to be found anywhere on the planet during his 
time ; and I can well accept as authentic the remark said 
to have been made by some one, that Daniel Webster must 
be a humbug, for no man could possibly be so great as he 
looked to be. In stature he was of medium height, about 
five feet and ten or eleven inches, I should say ; his form 
well-proportioned, robust, and vigorous ; his frame close- 
knit and firm-set ; his step resolute and fearless ; his carriage 
erect and manly ; his presence dignified and impressive in 
the highest degree. His complexion \vas dark, insomuch 
that he is said in his early years to have been familiarly 
called '' black Dan " ; his hair a pure raven black, till time 
sprinkled it with snows. I am little booked in physiology, 
but I should say his temperament was bilious sanguineous, 
as Burke's appears to have been nervous sanguineous. His 
features w^ere large and strong, but finely chiselled ; his neck 
thick and sinewy, — a fitting support for the magnificent 
dome poised upon it ; his chin prominent just to the point 
where firmness stops short of obstinacy ; his mouth calm 
and muscular; his eyes big, dark, and blazing, — in his 
excited moments they literally seemed two globes of fire ; 
his forehead high, broad, projecting, and massive, — a very 
cathedral indeed of thought ; and the whole suffused and 
harmonized with an air of majestic grace. 

So that the predominant expression of his face and head 
was that of immense power, but of power held perfectly in 
hand, and therefore sure to know its time. Hawthorne, in 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. I 5 

his Marble Fauii, has an expression so fine in itself and so 
apposite to Webster, that ever since my first reading of the 
book, it has stuck to my memory in connection with him. 
Speaking of the celebrated bronze statue of Marcus Aurehus 
the Emperor, he says, '' its very look is at once a command and 
a benediction." In his later years, Webster was often spoken 
of as ''the godhke Daniel"; and, sure enough, the heads 
that I have seen of old god Jupiter do not show an ampler 
dome or a more commanding outlook of intellectual majesty. 
Doubtless it was greatly owing to this expression of innate 
power which radiated from him, that even in his old age, 
when many minds were full of devouring thoughts about 
him, wherever he was present in person he was like Daniel 
in the lions' den : the lions might indeed growl behind their 
teeth, but they swallowed their rage, and dared not open 
their mouths to bite him. — Webster was a modest man; 
every thing about him was unaffected, genuine ; no assump- 
tion, no arrogance, no conceit : his dignity of manner, his 
greatness of look, were native to him ; and the impression 
his speaking always made upon me was such that I cannot 
better describe it than as follows : 

With grave 
Aspect he rose, and in his rising seem'd 
A pillar of State ; deep on his front engraven 
Deliberation sat, and public care ; 
And princely counsel in his face did shine 

Majestic : sage he stood, 

With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear 
The weight of mightiest monarchies ; his look 
Drew audience and attention still as night, 
Or Summer's noontide air. 

Webster's vast power of intellect is admitted by all : but 
it is not so generally known that he was as sweet as he was 



1 6 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

powerful, and nowhere more powerful than in his sweetness. 
When thoroughly aroused in public speech, there was indeed 
something terrible about him ; his huge burning eye seemed 
to bore a man through and through : but in his social hours, 
when his massive brow and features were lighted up with a 
characteristic smile, it was like a gleam of Paradise ; no 
person who once saw that full-souled smile of his could ever 
forget it. His goodly person, his gracious bearing, and his 
benignant courtesy made him the delight of every circle he 
entered : in the presence of ladies, especially, his great 
powers seemed to robe themselves spontaneously in beauty ; 
and his attentions were so delicate and so respectful, that 
they could not but be charmed. 

In the Summer of 1839, Webster, with several members 
of his family, made a private visit to England ; and it is both 
pleasant and edifying to learn how he impressed the people 
there. Hallam, we are told, was '^ extremely struck by his 
appearance, deportment, and conversation." Carlyle pro- 
nounced him " a magnificent specimen " ; adding, withal, 
that, " as a parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to 
back him at first sight against all the extant world." Mr. 
John Kenyon travelled with him four days. Writing, in 
1853, to Mr. George Ticknor, of Boston, he says that the 
acquaintance thus formed " enabled me to know and to love 
not only the great-brained, but large-hearted, genial man ; 
and this love I have held for him ever since, through good 
report and evil report ; and I shall retain this love for him to 
the day of my own departure." Again, referring to some of 
Webster's playful sallies : " Fancy how delightful and how 
attaching I found all this genial bearing from so famous a 
man ; so affectionate, so little of a humbug. His greatness 
sat so easy and calm upon him ; he never had occasion to 
whip himself into a froth." 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 1/ 

Before proceeding further, I must frankly admit certain 
drawbacks and exceptions in the character of my theme. 
For I have hved too long in this world to approve of every 
thing that any man does, or to expect any man to approve 
of every tiling that I do. And I remember, also, the saying 
of a verv wise author, that '•' the web of our life is of a 
mingled yarn, good and ill together : our virtues would be 
proud, if our faults whipped them not ; and our faults would 
despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues." And 
so, to be sure, I have never known any man or woman who 
seemed to me absolutely perfect, and I venture to doubt 
whether there be one such now in this room : I have indeed 
met several who thought or seemed to think tliemselves so ; 
but in that case I alwavs like to know what their neighbours 
think about it. At all events, Webster, like other men, cer- 
tainly had his faults and imperfections ; and, amidst so much 
that was great and nol)le, candour may not permit the blem- 
ishes to be passed over in silence ; though I hope to keep 
ever in mind the saying of Burke, " He censures God, who 
quarrels with the imperfections of men." And even the 
faults which I find in Webster appear to me mainly, if not 
entirely, as things lying on the outside and surface of his 
character, not as entering into the heart and substance of it. 

In the first place, then, it is thought by many, and I am 
apt to think myself, that Webster sometimes got too ner- 
vously anxious to be President of the United States. A 
great authority tells us that ••' ambition is the last infirmity 
of noble minds." Webster undoubtedly had that infirmity 
in a high degree. As far back as 1834, he began to be 
talked of for the Presidency ; and from that time onward 
his aspirations looked, probably with increasing strength, 
to that office. But I do not believe, and I challenge any- 



1 8 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

body to prove, that he ever did any tiling wrong, or any 
thing mean, tliat he ever swerved a hair from his honest 
convictions of duty, in order to gain the office. Nor did 
he affect any indifference, or use any arts of conceahnent, 
about it : all was frank, open, and above-board with him ; 
no intrigue, no ])laying at hide-and-seek, no political trick- 
ery, had roothold in his ambition. On this head, we may, 
with supreme fitness, apply to him what he himself said of 
Calhoun : ''If he had aspirations, they were high and hon- 
ourable and noble : there was nothing grovelling or low or 
meanly selfish, that came near the head or the heart of Mr. 
Calhoun." 

The truth is, Webster had early and honestly identified 
himself with what was then known as the Whig party against 
what was called the Jackson party. The latter had openly 
put forth as its motto, " To the victors belong the spoils " : 
but the Whig politicians soon became even more recklessly 
eager to act on this principle than their opponents were. 
Webster did not share with them at all in this passion ; he 
set his face against it utterly : and, though they wanted his 
help, and gloried in his leadership, they were still dissat- 
isfied with him because he would not " narrow his mind, 
and to party give up what was meant for mankind." He 
told the country again and again, that the spoils system, as 
it is called, would, if persisted in, " entirely change the 
character of our government." We have been hearing a 
great deal lately, none too much though, about the cor- 
ruption and demoralization growing out of this abominable 
system, \\'ell, Webster foresaw and foretold the whole evil 
and danger of it fifty years ago ; his most emphatic repro- 
bation of it being uttered in a speech at Worcester, on the 
1 2th of October, 1832. But the thing was vastly popular 



~ WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. I9 

then, and brought immense eclat and success to the authors 
of it. The poUticians all went for it of course, and egged 
it on as a grand step of progress and reform ; for such men 
are always sure to be sailing with the wind, it being the 
heisht of their ambition to serve as weathercocks on the top 
of an edifice, exalted for their levity and versatility, so as to 
indicate each shifting of the popular gale. But Webster was 
quite another sort of man ; a man built high and strong in 
moral courage : and the great trouble with him was, that he 
was ever stemming some headlong current of popularity, and 
indeed " striding so far aliead of the time as to dwarf him- 
self by the distance." I could point out many instances 
where he planted himself square against the popular rush and 
clamour of the day. So he stood inexorably firm against the 
incorporation of Texas ; and he did this expressly on the 
ground, that he never would consent to add a single foot to 
the area of slavery. Here, again, the thing was hugely popu- 
lar : and so even Northern Freesoilers, as they were then 
called, went for it, and it was carried by their votes ; Webster, 
meanwhile, solemnly forewarning them that it would one day 
shake the government to its foundations. And, sure enough, 
that one act was the seminal principle, the prohfic germ, of 
our civil war, with all its terrible, its unspeakable retributions. 
Though myself for many years among the staunchest of 
Whigs, yet I must now confess that the Whig party, as a 
whole, was a confoundedly mean party, — mean in its impo- 
tent craving for " the loaves and fishes," mean in its unblush- 
ing preference of success without merit to merit without 
success ; false to its professions, false to its leaders, false to 
itself. But it has ever been the curse of democracies to be 
infested with greedy demagogues, that is to say, with mere 
politicians, — probably the meanest and most noxious ani- 



20 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

mals on tlie planet. They will at all times eat any quantity 
of dirt to the people, to get the people's votes. This Web- 
ster never did, never would do. Accordingly he was in fact 
treated better by his political opponents than by his polit- 
ical associates. In 1836 the AVhigs nominated ]\Ir. Clay. 
This was a good nomination, and Webster sustained it 
heartily. Failing to elect Clay, the party then got badly 
smitten with the disease of " availability " ; in other words, 
the WJiig politicians were dying for the spoils. In the 
strength of that disease, they elected General Harrison in 
1840, and General Taylor in 1848 : but they failed to elect 
General Scott in 1852 ; whereupon the party died of that 
disease, as indeed it richly deserved to do. I have it on 
good authority, that, soon after the nomination of Scott, 
Webster, then struggling with his last sickness, said to his 
son Fletcher, " My son, never undertake to serve the Whig 
party ; Sir, the Whig party cannot be served." 

I say we all know that Webster aspired to the Presidency. 
Well, he had a right to aspire to the Presidency ; he ought 
to have aspired to it ; he must have been either more or less 
than a man, not to have so aspired : for he could hardly 
help seeing, what everybody else saw, that he was generally 
thought to be altogether the fittest man in the country for 
that place. And here I am minded to relate a rather appo- 
site passage that occurred during the presidential campaign 
of 1852. The matter was told me by Mr. William Bates, (I 
think liis name was AVilliam,) a prominent lawyer and an 
estimable gentleman, of Westfield, Massachusetts, long a 
personal and political friend of Webster. It so happened 
that they met and rode together in a car. Their talk natur- 
ally ran a good deal upon the political movements of the 
day. In the course of their talk, ]\Ir. Bates said to Webster, 



WEBSTER CEXTENNIAL. 21 

" Well; Mr. Webster, I have thought a great deal on the sub- 
ject, and have often asked myself whether, after all, the 
Presidency could do any thing for you : and really, Mr. 
Webster, I doubt whether it could ; I am inclined to think 
you are quite as well without it." Webster replied : "To be 
frank with you, Mr. Bates, the same question has occurred 
to me. And perhaps it is as you say ; perhaps I am just as 
well without that office. But, Sir, it is a great office ; why, 
Mr. Bates, it is the greatest office in the world : and I am 
but a man, Sir ; I want it, I want it." Now, if there be any 
man who thinks a jot the worse of Daniel Webster for all this, 
I confess I would a little rather not ride in the same coach 
with that man. 

Webster did not rise to that office, or rather the office did 
not rise to him : it could have added no honour to him ; he 
would have added much honour to it. In truth, as matters 
then stood, he was too great for the place, or rather he was 
a greater man than the politicians thought it for their interest 
to have there. For our politicians, to be sure, like to have 
their pockets well filled, or their ships well ballasted, with the 
office-patronage of the government ; and so they of course 
prefer to see the Presidency held by a putty-head or a dough- 
face ; that is to say, a man whom they can work and wind 
and manage. Webster felt the event deeply, indeed, too 
deeply. And what I rather regret than censure in him is, 
that he did not view the result with that calmness, that phi- 
losophy, which the world had a right to expect from so great 
a man ; that he allowed himself to be grieved and worried 
by the disappointment more than in reason he ought. 
Doubtless his grief was the deeper, because he was con- 
scious of having served his country faithfully and well ; for 
the sense of such injustice joined with such ingratitude cuts 



22 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

to the quick : but he should have stayed his lion-hearted 
manhood on the fact, notorious in all ages, that politicians, 
in their miserable shortsightedness, will at any time sacrifice 
their best friends in the vain hope of gaining support from 
their opponents. 

In the second place, Webster was something too loose in 
his money matters. Though second to none of our states- 
men as a financier for the public, he allowed his own private 
finances to be much disordered ; was too careless of incurring 
debts, not careful enough of paying them. This I reckon a 
greater fault than the former : in that, he only wronged him- 
self; in this, he did wrong to others. Of course nobody 
can suppose he meant to keep from others their dues ; but 
this is not quite enough. Probably the right explanation is, 
that he had his big head swarming with big thoughts, and so 
was oblivious in this point. 

A little incident has come to my knowledge, which may 
here illustrate his character. I have been told that, on some 
occasion, Mr. Seaton, one of the editors of The National 
JnfelUgencer, called on Webster in Washington, and had a 
talk with him. During their interview, a beggar-man came 
into the room, and solicited an alms. Webster, without 
pausing in his talk, thrust his fingers into his vest pocket, 
pulled out a bill, and handed it to the man, who then went 
out. When the talk came to a pause, Mr. Seaton asked 
Webster if he knew what he had given to that beggar-man. 
"Beggar-man?" said Webster; "what beggar-man?" 
" Why," said Mr. Seaton, " the one who came in just now, 
while you were talking." " O, yes," said Webster, "it seems 
to me I do remember something about it. Well, what did I 
give him? " "A hundred-dollar bill," said Mr. Seaton. 

Now, a man may have a right, though even that is doubt- 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 23 

ful, to be oblivions of what is due in this kind from others to 
himself; but no one has a right to be oblivious of what is 
due from himself to others. True, Webster was as far as 
possible from being either stingy or grasping. If prodigal 
of his own means, he was nowise greedy of other men's. 
Neither did he ever use, or abuse, his place in the govern- 
ment to the ends of self-enrichment. Herein it may well be 
wished that more of our present national law- makers were 
guilty of his worst fault : in that case, I suspect their patri- 
otic toils would not prove quite so remunerative as they often 
do. Webster, indeed, cared nothing for money, while at the 
same time he had " a tear for pity, and a hand open as day 
for melting charity " ; and whatever cash he at any time had 
in his purse ran away as freely as water, whether in payment 
of debts or in relief to the needy. I am only sorry he was 
not more mindful to be just before being generous either to 
others or to himself. 

But then it is to be borne in mind, that, in giving himself 
up to the public service, he was obliged to relinquish the 
greater part of a large professional income. After being 
twice elected to Congress in his native State, he removed 
from Portsmouth to Boston in 181 7, where he forthwith 
entered upon a career of great professional distinction, and 
his legal practice soon rose to the amount of twenty thousand 
dollars a-year ; which was a prodigious income for a lawyer in 
those times. The good people of Boston repeatedly urged 
him to let himself be nominated for Congress, which he 
repeatedly declined, chiefly on the ground that he could not 
afford it. At length, in 1823, they may be said to have 
forced the nomination upon him : he reluctantly yielded, 
and was elected. After serving through one Congress, he 
was elected again in 1825, having 4,990 votes out of 5,000. 



24 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

Now our national legislators at that time were paid only eight 
dollars a- day, and this only during the actual session of Con- 
gress. No wonder Webster held back from such a curtail- 
ment of his means. For he was by nature free, generous, 
and magnificent in his dispositions. Later in life, his vast 
reputation, tlie dignity and elegance of his manners, the en- 
gaging suavity and affability of his conversation, in a word, 
the powerful magnetism of the man, drew a great deal of high 
company round him, and necessarily made his expenses 
large. Then too all the money in the country could not 
measure the worth of his services. Still it would have been 
better for his peace of mind, and would have saved a deal 
of ugly scandal, if he had kept strictly within the small 
returns which his great public services brought in to him. 

It is but just to add that in his closing years his mind 
became very uneasy on this account. In the Spring of 1852, 
he being then in President Fillmore's cabinet, a fee of 
$15,000 was offered him by Goodyear & Co. to engage his 
services in their great india-rubber case. He wanted the 
fee, but was very loth to undertake the case, as it seemed to 
him hardly becoming for one in his position to do so. His 
friends, however, the President among them, strongly advised 
him to accept the offer : so he argued and won the case. 
He is said to have expressed a wish for one more such fee, 
as this would discharge hi^s debts, and make him a free man. 

Touching this matter, certain people are wont to speak 
of Webster as if n® other great man had ever run into like 
embarrassments. Now, Charles Watson Wentworth, tlie cel- 
ebrated Marquess of Rockingham, died in 1782, while he 
was Prime Minister. The day before his death, he gave 
special directions to have a codicil added to his will, can- 
celling all acknowledgments of debt due to him from his 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 2$ 

" admirable friend, Edmund Burke." The amount of Burke's 
indebtedness to his lordship is not precisely known ; but it 
is said to have been not less than ^30,000. As money was 
then probably worth twice as much as in Webster's time, 
this would make a sum nearly equivalent to $300,000 in our 
reckoning. But Rockingham's mind was framed in such 
nobility of justice, that he seemed to think himself only hon- 
oured by such munificence to the transcendant statesman of 
his age ; whose services, however, to his country had not, up 
to that time, come anywhere near those rendered to this 
nation by Webster. But both these great men were alike 
drawn away from living for themselves, and from work that 
pays, to a course of living and working for mankind, — a 
service that commonly has to be its own reward. 

Webster's service to the country was fully commensurate 
with his greatness as a man. It may well be questioned, 
indeed, whether even Washington himself did the nation 
greater service tlian he : for without our American Union 
the achievement of our American independence could hardly 
have proved a blessing. And so I think the history shows 
us that, during the interval from the Revolution to the Con- 
stitution, the States were not nearly so well off as they had 
been under the British rule. That rule was of course im- 
perial ; and such, in substance and effect, is the rule of our 
national government now. And, surely, some such para- 
mount and inclusive authority was and yer must be need- 
ful in order to keep peace between the States ; otherwise 
it were hardly possible to prevent a chronic antagonism and 
bloody quarrels from springing up amongst them. There 
seems to be, indeed, for the American people, no middle 
or tenable ground between the government of our present 



26 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

national Union and that state of things, at once horrible and 
contemptible, which we call Mexicanism ; and, rather than 
the nation should become Mexicanized, it were far better 
that the whole land, with all the people on it, should be 
sunk in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. 

Be this as it may, with Webster, love of that Union, in- 
generate in his nature, and cherished by his education, had 
grown with his growth, and strengthened with his strength. 
He was elected to the national Senate in 1827. Early in 
his senatorial career he saw that certain causes or forces 
were working deeply and silently, and therefore the more 
dangerously, to bring about a rupture of that Union. He 
also saw that, if the structure of our national State were 
once demolished, it could never be rebuilt. He also saw 
that, for preventing this, two things were needful : first, that 
the people needed to have their minds rightly and thor- 
oughly informed in the nature and principles of our Con- 
stitution ; second, that they needed to have their hearts 
inspired with a deep, earnest, heroic passion of nationality, 
with an ardent, self-sacrificing devotion to the Union, as it was. 

Thus his eye took in the whole situation, his mighty grasp 
of thought surrounded the entire question. He therefore 
set himself, with all his powers of mind and body, to the 
work, and never ceased till the work was done. For more 
than twenty years, it was the main burden of all his thought 
and all his discourse. He was a great lawyer, and knew the 
law ; he was a great orator, and could speak what he knew ; 
he was a great statesman, with his mind thoroughly at home 
in the creative and controlling forces of social, civil, and 
political well-being : therewithal he had that indispensable 
element of all high statesmanship, a large, warm, tender 
heart : and in the strength of this combination he saw and 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 2/ 

felt that the preservation of our national Union was the one 
thing needful above all others to the welfare of the American 
people. So, in due time, he just educated and kindled the 
people up to his own height, filling their minds with his 
thoughts, their hearts with his fervour, their mouths with 
his words. In doing this, he won the title of the great Ex- 
pounder and the great Defender of the American Constitu- 
tion, and surely no title was ever better deserved. On the 
26th of January, 1830, he met the great champion of South- 
ern Nullification in the Senate, wrestled with him, threw 
him, and broke every bone in his body. I think I may 
safely affirm that this reply to Hayne produced a greater 
effect than any other speech ever delivered in the world ; 
excepting, of course, those recorded in the Bible. Speeches 
greater in themselves have indeed been made : Webster him- 
self has several that are greater ; and some of Burke's, I 
suspect, are greater than any of his ; but no one of Burke's, 
nor any other of Webster's, came up to that in effectiveness. 
This was greatly owing to the peculiar circumstances of the 
time, and the state of the public mind. The tide of dis- 
union sentiment was then setting in fast and strong ; men's 
minds were becoming deeply excited and agitated with 
doubts and misgivings ; on all hands, the worth and stability 
of the Union were drawn in question : Webster turned that 
tide completely, and it has gone on ebbing ever since : in 
short, that speech made, and marks, the beginning of a 
new era in our national life : from that time forward, other 
thoughts and other feelings took fast roothold in the minds 
and hearts of the people. 

Mr. Hayne was a superb man, able, eloquent, honourable, 
high-souled. Not long after Webster's speech, he withdrew 
from the Senate, and was replaced by a much greater cham- 



28 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

pion of the same cause, who, meanwhile, had resigned the 
office of A^ice President for that very purpose. When the 
question came up again, Mr. Calhoun waited till most of the 
Senators on the other side had said the best they could for 
the Union ; he then took the floor, and in a rapture of logic 
tore their arguments all to shreds, and sent tliem flying like 
straws in a tempest. Then came Webster's turn. So, on 
the 1 6th of February, 1833, he took the floor, and just drove 
a huge wedge of adamantine logic right through the centre 
of Calhoun's masterly argument, splitting it clean asunder 
from end to end. Nullification was now fairly pounded to a 
jelly, nor was it ever after able to resume the form of bone 
and muscle in Congress. Then and tliere it was that the 
real battles of the Union were fought and won. For the 
cause had to be tried in the courts of legislative reason before 
it could come to trial in the field of battle ; nor, in all human 
probability, would it ever have triumphed in the latter, if its 
right so to triumph had not first been made good in the 
former : and that this right was there and thus made good, 
was mainly owing, under God, to the Herculean intellect, the 
mighty eloquence, the great soul, the generous and compre- 
hensive wisdom of Daniel Webster. 

Of course we all understand that slavery was at the bottom 
of this whole business. Other causes were indeed often 
alleged, but this was only a disguise, and probably deceived 
nobody. Now Webster hated slavery much, and on all 
proper occasions he was downright and outspoken in his 
aversion to it. He thought it a great moral, social, and 
political evil, a consuming cancer, the iinmcdicabile mdnus 
of the social body ; and he often so declared himself. He 
also saw, what I suppose we all see now, that there was no 
power in the country which could kill slavery but the national 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 2g 

government, and that the national government could do this 
only in the exercise of its military power, and in a case of 
actual war, — civil war ; and this was a remedy which, vastly 
to his credit, he could not bear to think of. 

I believe — I hope you all believe — that love is, in gen- 
eral, if not universally, a higher, better, stronger force than 
hate. I also hold, — do not you ? — that love of that which 
is good is a better and stronger principle than hatred of that 
which is bad ; though I have nothing to say against hatred 
of what is bad. I have said that Webster hated slavery 
much : he did so, his whole life proves it ; but he loved the 
Union more, yes, a good deal more, than he hated slavery. 
He believed slavery to be bad ; he believed the Union to be 
good. That love was, indeed, all through his public life, a 
passion with him ; nay, more, it was f/ie master-passion of 
his soul : it had penetrated every fibre of his being. To his 
eye, " Earth had not any thing to show more fair " than the 
august and beautiful fabric of our national State. That this 
mighty structure, this masterpiece of political architecture, 
should be laid in tlie dust, was too much for him : the very 
thought of it literally wrung his heart with anguish. His 
supreme desire was, to have the Union so strengthened, so 
established in the minds and hearts of the people, so bound 
up, so interwoven with their dearest household ties and 
affections, that neither slavery nor any other power should 
be able to prevail against it. 

Now there was a considerable and a growing class of peo- 
ple at the North who got so possessed with an all-absorbing, 
all-consuming liatred of slavery, that they went to hating the 
Union on slavery's account : on all hands their orators were 
denouncing the Constitution as " a covenant with Hell " ; 
were openly avowing the wish, nay, the purpose, of having 



30 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

it exploded ; and their burning words were threatening to 
kindle such a fire as would burn it down. Even Washing- 
ton himself also, and others who had the strongest claims to 
gratitude and veneration as the founders and benefactors 
of our Republic, were daily dragged forth by them, to be 
roasted in the fires, or tortured on the racks of detraction 
and defamation ; like men desecrating the sepulchres and 
exhuming the bones of their fathers, in order to gibbet them 
before the world. At the same time, there was a consider- 
able and a growing class of people at the South, who got 
so possessed with an all-absorbing, all-consuming love of 
slavery, that they also went to hating the Union for slavery's 
sake, and openly embarked in a crusade for breaking it up. 
Though the spirit of disunion had been thrashed out of the 
ugly form of Nullification, still it was not dead ; and it soon 
after reappeared in the garb of a very gentle, harmless, 
smiling lady, named Peaceable Secession. 'I'hus the extrem- 
ists of both sections, the extreme haters of slavery at the 
North, and the extreme lovers of slavery at the South, were 
practically leagued together in a common cause, conjointly 
aiming to break up the Union, to demolish the fabric of 
our National State, at once the fortress and the temple of 
American freedom ; though, to be sure, they were doing 
this from opposite motives, the former to destroy slavery, 
the latter to perpetuate it. Divided in their ultimate aims, 
they were nevertheless united in their present purpose. And 
the war of words between them kept waxing hotter and 
hotter year after year. 

At length, in 1850, the thing was visibly growing to a head. 
Webster saw, — at least he believed, — that the South were 
in dead earnest, that they had worked themselves up to the 
full bent, and were really of a mind to do what they were 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 3 1 

threatening, come what might. He also saw that the con- 
troversies then raging between the North and the South, 
unless they could be allayed, must soon culminate in seces- 
sion and civil war. The South were talking of peaceable 
secession. Webster knew that secession would not, could 
not, be peaceable. So, in his speech on the 7th of March, 
fixing his big, blazing eyes full on the Southern members, he 
spoke these words : " Peaceable secession ! Sir, your eyes 
and mine are never destined to see that miracle. Who is so 
foolish — I beg everybody's pardon — as to expect to see 
any such thing ? There can be no such thing as a peaceable 
secession. Peaceable secession is an utter impossibility. Is 
the great Constitiution under which we live, covering this 
whole country, is it to be thawed and melted away by seces- 
sion, as the snows on the mountain melt under the influence 
of a vernal Sun, disappear almost unobserved, and run off? 
No, Sir ! No, Sir ! I will not state what might produce 
the disruption of the Union ; but I see, as plainly as I see 
the Sun in heaven, what that disruption itself must produce : 
I see that it must produce war, and such a war as I will not 
describe, in its twofold character.^'' The words twofold 
character were a hint, if they would but take it, that in such 
a war the beloved slavery they were fighting for would prove 
an ugly thorn in their side. 

Now, for the prevention, or, if this might not be, for the 
postponement, of such an issue, Webster felt that every dan- 
ger must be braved, every exertion made, every sacrifice 
incurred. For these reasons, he put forth his whole strength 
in favour of the Compromise Measures of 1850. He well 
knew the risk he was running ; but, in his judgment, the 
occasion called on him, imperatively, to stand to the work. 
His language to a private friend was, " It seemed to me that 



32 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

the country demanded the sacrifice of a human victim, and I 
saw no reason why I should not be the victim myself." So, 
in the last hope of saving his cause, he deliberately staked 
his all. He himself went down indeed, but the cause was 
saved. In all this, most assuredly, he was right, nobly right, 
heroically right. And his whole action at that time proved 
him to be as great morally as he was intellectually. 

In another speech, on the 1 7th of July, — the last he ever 
made in the Senate, — he closed with the following : " For 
myself, I propose. Sir, to abide by the principles and the 
purposes which I have avowed. I shall stand by the Union, 
and by all who stand by it. I shall do justice to the whole 
country, according to the best of my ability, in all I say, and 
act for the good of the whole country in all I do. I mean 
to stand upon the Constitution. I need no other platform. 
The ends I aim at shall be my country's, my God's, and 
Truth's. I was born an /\merican ; I will live an American ; 
I shall die an American ; and I intend to perform the duties 
incumbent upon me in that character to the end of my 
career. I mean to do this with absolute disregard of per- 
sonal consequences. What are personal consequences? 
What is the individual man, with all the good or evil that 
may betide him, in comparison with the good or evil which 
may befall a great country in a crisis like this? Let the 
consequences be what they may, I am careless. No man 
can suffer too much, and no man can fall too soon, if he 
suffer or if he fall in defence of the liberties and Constitution 
of his country." These words, I confess, have to me a very 
solemn and pathetic interest, as the last ever spoken by our 
incomparable Senator in that capacity. 

The Compromise Measures were at last carried ; and it is 
admitted by all that they could not have been carried without 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 33 

Webster's powerful aid. Thus the explosion, then so immi- 
nent, was postponed. Ten years of time were thereby 
gained. It is not too much to say that this gaining of time 
saved the Union : for we may well shudder to think of what, 
in all probability, would have been the result, had the explo- 
sion come on in 1851, instead of 186 1. At the former 
period, we had a divided North and a united South. Dur- 
ing the interval, the hideous doings in Kansas took place ; 
which so disgusted and alienated the northern people, that 
we then had, for the first time, the golden prospect of a 
divided South and a united North. 

Webster's course touching the Compromise Measures 
drew upon him a perfect tempest of obloquy and abuse 
both North and South. My father-in-law, the late Mr. 
Henry Bright, of Northampton, a very clear-headed and 
just-thinking man, was in Mobile on private business at the 
time when Webster's speech of the 7th of March reached 
that city. He told me that the '*' fire-eaters " there were 
seized with such an inexpressible rage against Webster, that 
he really believed, if they could have got hold of him, they 
would have chopped him all to pieces. At the same time, 
and for the same cause, the extremists at the North went 
with equal fury to butchering his character, — a sort of 
butchery not very much better, perhaps, than the other. I 
have no language to describe the shocking bitterness and 
virulence with which his name was vilified and hunted down 
here in New England. Why, the moral and social atmos- 
phere of Boston is still sick with the abominable venom 
spouted against him here by certain liberal preachers and 
lecturers. For I suppose we all know that the most illiberal 
and venom-mouthed men in the world are often found among 
those who make special professions of liberality, and greatly 



34 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

pride themselves thereon ; men who insist on being them- 
selves perfectly free to think and speak their own thoughts, 
and on having all others perfectly free to think and speak 
just as they do. For we are to note that the words liberty 
and liberality are of kindred origin and meaning : and what 
is the use of our having liberty, if we be not, ipso facto, free 
to traduce and begnaw and blacken all who are so de- 
praved as not to accept our judgment for their own? Now, 
for my part, I wish to be liberal even towards illiberality 
itself; yet must confess I sometimes find this rather diffi- 
cult. The truth of the matter, as nearly as I can under- 
stand it, runs about thus : The men in question had con- 
ceived a bitter hatred of the Union ; Webster had thoroughly 
identified himself with the Union : so they just transferred 
their hatred of the Union to him ; for such men always take 
more pleasure in hating a person than a thing ; and this, I 
suppose, partly because a person naturally has sensibilities 
that may be hurt, which a thing has not : they were labour- 
ing with all their might to destroy the Union ; Webster had 
saved the Union ; and now they were possessed with an in- 
tense longing to destroy him. It may almost be said indeed 
that they did destroy him : at least their envenomed calum- 
nies greatly embittered his closing years, and sent him sor- 
rowing to his grave. But they did not destroy his work : 
the Union was saved. In all this we have a memorable 
instance of what fanaticism can do, especially when actuated 
by a sort of philanthropic ferocity. Nor has the spirit en- 
gendered by those proceedings fully died out yet : even to 
this day it is hardly safe for a man to speak an honest plain 
word in defence of this part of Webster's life, lest popular 
odium should pelt him with mud or something worse. 

Now, during all those years I was myself a most cordial 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 35 

hater of slavery ; though I never went to the extreme — God 
forbid ! — of hating either the Union or Webster : for how 
hatred of these could do any thing towards pulling slavery 
down, was quite beyond me. Nor was I ever able to com- 
prehend why the Abolitionists should make it an exercise of 
religion, as they did, to go about cursing and reviUng all that 
was greatest and best in the work of our national fathers : it 
seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, an aggravated 
revival of that old mystery, the odium theologicu77i ; that is to 
say, the offspring of sheer fanaticism, and a very malignant 
fanaticism too ; the selfsame spirit that has more than once 
set men to cutting throats in the name of liberty and phi- 
, lanthropy. 

As for the speech of the yth of March, for which Webster 
was so bitterly, so atrociously maligned, I have read that 
speech a great many times, and I do not know of a single 
word in it that I would have otherwise than as it is. I think it 
every way just such a speech as should have been made at 
that time by a great man, who had a great Union to save, 
and a great civil war to avert. Nor could Webster have con- 
sistently taken any other course : he would have belied his 
whole record, he would have been recreant to the sovereign 
aim of his life, if, in that great national crisis, he had not 
thrown all other regards to the winds, and made the Union 
his paramount, nay, his exclusive concern. So, there again, 
though, to be sure, with his great heart quivering and bleed- 
ing at the defection of friends, and the cruel, cruel aspersions 
of those whom he had loved so deeply and served so de- 
votedly, he stood firm as a rock against the surging and 
dashing waves of unpopularity in his own cherished home. 
Seeing the peril as he saw it, he must needs have braved 
popular clamour as he braved it, else he would have ceased 



l6 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

to be Daniel Webster. So that Massachusetts went back on 
him, or froze off from him, just at the very time when he was 
worthiest of her love and honour. But then we all ought to 
know that, in such cases, the blind or the blear-eyed many 
are pretty sure to denounce and defame the one who sees. 
When, in 1830 and 1833, Webster encountered Nullification 
in debate, and strangled it in the crushing anaconda folds of 
his logic and eloquence, he appeared great indeed, and was 
great ; though he then had all New England and most of the 
entire North backing him up and cheering him on. But a 
great man never appears so great as when he stands true to 
himself and his cause, with all the world against him. And 
so, to my thinking, at no other time of his life did Webster's 
stubborn greatness of soul, his " colossal manhood," towet 
up in such monumental grandeur as when, in 1850, he stood 
true to himself, " unshaken, unseduced, unterrified," with all 
New England and most of the entire North banded together 
to pelt him off and hiss him down. 

The fineness of such metal is not found 
In Fortune's love ; for then the bold and coward, 
The hard and soft, seem all affined and kin : 
But, in the wind and tempest of her frown. 
Distinction, with a broad and powerful fan, 
Puffing at all, winnows the light away ; 
And what hath mass and matter, by itself 
Lies rich in virtue and unmingled. 

W^ebster had foreseen and foretold a whirlwind of civil 
war as the inevitable consequence of the wind which the an- 
tagonist extremists were sowing. Both parties alike laughed 
him to scorn ; they derided his fears, they despised his 
warnings ; could not speak of them save as themes of scof- 
fing and ridicule ; saying that they were the mere offspring 
of his inordinate ambition ; that he had turned prophet 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 37 

merely because he wanted to be President. Nor did they 
give over this work when the great man died : they even 
made his death a crime ; alleging that he had died of dis- 
appointed ambition and from the effects of personal vices ; 
just as if a man at the age of threescore-and-ten had not 
a right to die ! Now Webster, I take it, was at least not a 
fool, not absolutely a fool. Nor was he so little read in the 
book of human nature and human life as not to know that 
the course he was taking could not possibly gain him any 
thing at the South, while it was sure to lose him much at 
the North. Any man with but half an eye could not fail 
to see that. And Webster himself had plainly declared it 
in a passage I have already cited. Strange, strange indeed, 
what absurd reasons even good men will sometimes stick 
upon, for thinking that a man cannot possibly differ from 
them in opinion, unless he have a bad heart ! 

So, in the instance before us, the treatment Webster re- 
ceived proceeded, apparently, upon the rather odd notion, 
that, in the political questions of the time, he was just the 
last man in the country who ought to be allowed to have 
a mind of Jiis own. A great many people in Massachusetts, 
it seems, could nowise conceive on what ground, or by what 
right, he should presume to have a mind larger than their 
own State, or, at all events, larger than their own section. 
That his heart dared to be big enough to embrace the whole 
United States, and to be satisfied with nothing less, and that 
his moral manhood spread so wide, and stood so firm, as 
to be unflinchingly steadfast to the integrity of the Union, — 
this was, in the eye of Massachusetts, an unpardonable sin : 
she could not forgive it then, she has not forgiven it now. 
But, assuredly, Webster's great soul will sooner or later be 
found to have been greater than she, and will prove too 



38 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

Strong for her yet. For, indeed, he was not hei' man ; he 
was emphatically the Nation's man : and, though he loved 
her deeply, yet he would not budge an inch from his life- 
long purpose as an American, to gratify her sectional nar- 
rowness, or her war-kindling philanthropy. 

How he thought and felt touching this whole matter, is 
perhaps best shown in a speech made at Buffalo on the 2 2d 
of May, 1 85 1 . Of course he is referring to his line of action 
in 1850: " I am an American. I was made a whole man, 
and I did not mean to make myself half a one. I felt that 
I had a duty to perform to my country, to my own reputa- 
tion ; for I flattered myself that a service of forty years had 
given me some character, on which I had a right to repose 
for my justification in the performance of a duty attended 
with some degree of local unpopularity. I thought it was 
my duty to pursue this course, and I did not care what was 
to be the consequence. I felt it was my duty, in a very 
alarming crisis, to come out ; to go for my country, and my 
whole country ; and to exert any power I had, to keep that 
country together. I cared for nothing, I was afraid of noth- 
ing, but I meant to do my duty. Duty performed makes 
a man happy ; duty neglected makes a man unhappy. I 
therefore, in the face of all discouragements and all dangers, 
was ready to go forth and do what I thought my country, 
your country, demanded of me. And, Gentlemen, allow me 
to say here to-day, that if the fate of John Rogers had stared 
me in the face, if I had seen the stake, if I had heard the 
faggots already crackling, by the blessing of Almighty God I 
would have gone on and discharged the duty which I thought 
my country called upon me to perform." 

I think very highly of our Mr. Whittier both as a poet and 
as a man. I hold him to be a man of real genius, and of an 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 39 

altogether honourable and loveable character. But he has 
one little piece that I am sorry for. It was written in 1850, 
and is entitled Ichabod. I cannot see that it has any great 
merit as poetry ; and I see, or seem to see, in it not a little 
fault of uncharitableness : nay, I must go further, — the un- 
charity of it is simply atrocious. Now I do not believe there 
is or can be an honester man than Mr. Whittier ; but I hold 
Webster to have been every whit as honest as he, and at the 
same time a thousandfold wiser and vastly more charitable. 
It is no business of mine, nor do I propose to make it my 
business ; but, if I were an intimate friend of Mr. Whittier, 
I should be very earnest with him to recall and suppress that 
poem. It is not worthy of him. But, whether he did so or 
not, I should still continue to honour him all the same, not- 
withstanding. It is nowise likely that I shall ever give a 
lecture upon him ; if, however, I were to do so, I am afraid 
I should have to note this as a greater fault in him than any 
I am able to find in Webster. 

It is but fair to add, indeed it would be hardly fair not to 
add, that Mr. Whittier has lately put forth another poem, in 
which he makes some considerable amends for the piece of 
1850. This is entitled The Lost Occasion, and was pub- 
lished in The Atlantic Montlily iox April, 1880; not known 
to mc, however, when the foregoing strictures were \vi-itten. 
In his later piece, the author thinks that, if Webster had 
lived ten years longer, he would have been "disillusioned." 
Webster disillusioned! Disillusioned of what? Why, his 
presentiments, his predictions, all his worst forebodings, were 
justified, and more than justified, by the event. Was his 
prevision of civil war an illusion? Nay, the horrors and 
agonies of that war altogether outstripped the utmost that 
even he had strength to apprehend. Truly, one would think 



40 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

that Mr. Whittier, and not Webster, was the man to be dis- 
illusioned. Potent, potent indeed must have been the spell 
which, in so fair a mind, those four dreadful years of civil 
carnage could not* break ! 

In the earlier piece, at all events, Mr. Whittier prophesied 
an untrue thing, — for Webster's glory has not departed ; — 
is it not a glorious thing to be enrolled by wise old Harvard 
as one of the seven great orators of the world ? — in that case 
at least, I say, Mr. Whittier prophesied an untrue thing, — 
and he was believed ; Webster prophesied a true thing, and 
he was not believed : for, indeed, " his was the wise man's 
ordinary lot, to prophesy to ears that would not hear." But 
Massachusetts had then outgrown Webster, — so far outgrown 
him as to prefer one Horace Mann, who was among the 
loudest in rancorous invective against him. So, to shame 
Webster into her wisdom, her honourable Legislature had a 
statue of the said Horace Mann set up in front of the Capi- 
tol, and there it stands now. (By the way, I wish the friends 
of Webster would, some Sunday night when the Moon is 
shining, reverently take his statue out of that enclosure, and 
put it in some humbler place. For, surely, Webster is not 
worthy to stand there in such high company ; no, he is not 
worthy of that !) And Massachusetts has kept on growing 
since : why, she has grown almost to the bigness of General 
Butler ! She has not indeed quite overtaken his stature yet ; 
but perhaps she will ere long, for she is still growing. Yet 
no ! I doubt whether she will ever grow big enough for him, 
— big enough either to swallow him or be swallowed by him ; 
though, to be sure, he is the owner, or the tenant-in-fee, of 
"an unbounded stomach." 

Well, when at length Webster's predictions began to come 
true ; when Secession stood forth an actual fact, a presence 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 4I 

that could not be put by, the political leaders of the Northern 
extremists, both in and out of Congress, were utterly aghast, 
as indeed they well might be, at the final outcome of their 
doings. They had, by their incantations, raised, or helped 
to raise, something that looked very like the Devil ; and now 
the one all-engrossing thought was how to get rid of it. 
They had not believed the South were really in earnest, and 
they had imputed Webster's behef of it to bad motives. But 
there the thing was at last ; and what could be done with it ? 
that was the question. So they put their heads together, and 
made a formal proposition to the Southern leaders, solemnly 
pledging themselves to use all their efforts to carry through 
such an amendment of the Constitution as would secure 
slavery absolutely and for ever against all interference by the 
general government. The Southern leaders, in the misplaced 
pride of their hearts, spurned away the proposition, and 
laughed at the makers of it. They had got their heads very 
high. 

The extremists of both sections had at first hated Webster 
because they did not understand him, and had wronged him 
because they hated him ; and now they kept on hating 
him because they had wronged him. He had forewarned 
them of a particular mischief as the sure result of the course 
they were taking ; they had despised his counsels, and as- 
cribed them to an evil mind : and when his forecast became 
a fact, instead of relenting towards him, they even hated him 
worse than ever ; the very thought of him stung them with 
self-reproach ; and they sought to avenge upon him the mis- 
chief they had brought upon tliemselves, and went to accus- 
ing him as the author of what he had foretold. So, within 
the last few years, I have repeatedly found men seriously 
holding Webster responsible for our civil war ! Such is 



42 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

human nature ; and so, in all ages, have men been wont to 
recompense their greatest benefactors ! But wisdom not the 
less, though late, is sure to be justified of her children. And 
so, assuredly, it will be with \\xbster. 

At the time I am referring to, Webster's body had been 
in the grave nearly eight years and a half; but his spirit, 
though slumbering, was still alive, and would not die. His 
words were on the lips and in the hearts of the people from 
IMaine to California. Mark, then, how ''the whirligig of 
time brought in his revenges." When at length the attack 
on Fort Sumter rang all through the land like an omni- 
present clap of thunder, then it was that Webster's spirit 
awoke as from the dead. This time, the South had raised 
a spirit, not indeed so hideous as the one I mentioned be- 
fore, but a great deal more terrible. That spirit was — love 
of the Union. And whose spirit was that but Webster's? 
How gloriously it made the people of the North spring to 
arms ! Yes, the great soul of Daniel Webster breathing and 
beating in them, — this it was that set them astir, impelling 
them to the front, and holding them to the work, till Seces- 
sion was finally overwhelmed beneath a wide-sweeping tor- 
rent of blood and fire ! 

Now that war cost the North not less than eight hundred 
thousand lives and six thousand millions of money ! Perhaps 
the demoralization engendered out of it should be rated as 
a still greater cost : the Nation has not got over it yet, nor 
will it for fifty years to come. But, in the conflict which 
itself had provoked, slavery fell, and great was the fall 
thereof. Gloria in excels is for that fall ! For slavery was 
a loathsome and execrable old nuisance ; I thought so then, 
I think so now : and the only good thing it could possibly 
do was to die. I admit, indeed, that the purchase was 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 43 

worth the cost ; but it was a dreadful, dreadful price to pay, 
even for so auspicious a riddance as that ! 

Of course, if the extremists, those who got up the war, had 
foreseen what was coming, the thing would not have come ; 
at least it would not have come when it did. Yet, surely, it 
was bound to come, sooner or later ; it was only a question 
of time. But, thanks to Daniel Webster, the war was ad- 
journed till, as the event proved, the Nation was duly pre- 
pared for it, though not so prepared but that it was deeply 
punished in and by it. Nor did it escape his "large dis- 
course " that the crisis, after all, was but postponed : I have 
been told that in his private intercourse he expressed it as 
his settled conviction that such was the case. But, surely, 
Providence had a controlling liand in the whole matter ; and 
Providence knows its time, as it also knows how to make a 
good use of the blunders of men. Now those who had no 
foresight of what was coming may stand acquitted of crime, 
though not of blundering : yet I cannot say this for their 
huge unbenevolence towards their best friend : ignorance 
may be pardoned, malice may not. But, as Webster had a 
forecast of the whole, he was bound on every principle of 
humanity and of manhood to act as he did ; nay, he would 
.have been utterly inexcusable both as a statesman and as a 
man, if he had acted otherwise. 

But why was it that slavery had to fall ? Here I may claim 
some right to know what I am saying, because I had ocular 
and auricular proof on the subject. For I was myself in the 
army three years, serving the cause with such poor abilities 
as I had. And I was perfecdy satisfied from the outset, that 
either slavery or the Nation was bound to perish : I felt just 
as sure' of it then as I do now. In the Summer of 1861, I 
was living in the city of New York. Seeing in the papers 



44 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

one morning a notice of a meeting to be held in Hope 
Chapel for the purpose of helping on the war, I took a notion 
to go to it. Being there, I felt moved to make a speech. 
Having gained the ear of the audience, almost before I knew 
what I was saying, these words popped out of my mouth : 
" Slavery has now forced itself into a mortal duel with Uncle 
Sam, and one of them has got to die ; and, so far as I am 
concerned, it sliall not be Uncle Sam." At first, I was 
startled with the apprehension of having gone too far ; but, 
the audience raising a shout of applause, I saw that things 
were all right, and so went on. 

Carrying, as I did, this deep-seated conviction into the 
field, I longed, intensely longed, to have slavery knocked on 
the head. So I wanted to blaze away against it in my talks 
to the soldiers. Once or twice I did so, to some extent. 
My official superiors took me to task for this ; telling me 
that they had nothing to do with slavery ; that they were 
there to sustain the government ; and that they could not 
have discord and dissension sown among the soldiers by talks 
on that subject. In short, they gave me a peremptory order 
to let it alone. Of course I obeyed, though it went some- 
what against the grain with me. And the order was un- 
doubtedly right. I was serving in the Department of the 
South ; and my heart fairly leaped for joy when General 
Hunter issued his order or proclamation for emancipating 
the slaves in that Department. Yet I was not without serious 
misgivings ; for it rather seemed to me that such a measure 
as that ought to proceed from no one but the Commander-in- 
Chief of the armies and navies of the United States. You 
are probably aware that, when the order became known to 
President Lincoln, he forthwith overruled and countermanded 
it. This I was then sorry for. But, you see, I was in too 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 45 

great a hurry. Herein I was not so wise, not quite so wise, 
as our great and good and divinely-patient President, He, 
with his patience long and sorely tried by unwise and impa- 
tient men like myself, — tried quite as much perhaps in that 
Avay as in any other, — held back, and waited for the " riping 
of the time." In calling them unwise and impatient men 
like myself, I am far from meaning to compare my insignifi- 
cant self generally with them ; for they were, many of them, 
wise and good men in their degree ; but, I suspect, not 
quite so wise and patient as our good father Abraham. But, 
when our President saw, — for he had a strong, clear head 
on his shoulders as well as a warm and tender heart in his 
bosom, — when he saw that the time had come, he just 
hurled his thunderbolt, and knocked slavery into the place 
where it should be. By that time the soldiers had all been 
taught by the discipline and logic of events, that they had 
got to choose between the deatli of slavery and the death of 
the Nation ; that both of these could not possibly survive the 
struggle : and, when it came to that, they of course chose 
as Webster had taught and inspired them to choose. 

So then, while others had been pouring out, in language 
hissinQ:-hot, their intense hatred of slaverv, and even of the 
Union for slavery's sake, Webster had been pouring out his 
irresistible argument and eloquence in behalf of the Union 
which he loved ; and the love kindled by that eloquence and 
upheld by that argument, — this it was that really did the 
work. For, in truth, it so happened at that time, that the 
best and surest way to crush slavery was by strengthening the 
Union, — by arming Uncle Sam with a hand so big and so 
powerful, that he could just seize the bull of disunion by 
the horns, and wring the bull's head off. And so, when the 
people, both those at home and those in the field, became 



46 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

thoroughly convinced, as in time they did, that either slavery 
or Uncle Sam had got to die, they said, Uncle Sam shall not 
die, and slavery shall ; and the spirit which thus spoke had 
been kindled within them by the man who was born up in 
New Hampshire one hundred years ago this day. AVebster, 
to be sure, did not intend the destruction of slavery ; that 
was nowise the motive of his labours : but he did intend 
that the Union should be kept alive, and all his mighty ener- 
gies were directed to this end ; such being, as I must think, 
the special purpose for which he was providentially endowed, 
and given to the American people. And so the extremists, 
North and South, — they it was who, between them, got up 
our civil war ; Webster had no hand in that ; but he it was 
who, in effect, fought the battles and gained the victories of 
the Union : for, as the late Judge Redfield, of this city, 
once said to me, '' the war was all fought out on Daniel 
Webster's hnes." 

Now, which do you suppose did the most towards the 
final result, hatred of slavery, or love of the Union ? Which 
was the stronger principle here, hatred of that which was 
bad, or love of that which was good? And who did the 
most for the final triumph of the very cause which the Abo- 
litionists had so much at heart, they themselves, or the man 
whom they so mercilessly calumniated? They endeavoured 
with all their might to break him down ; and he just saved 
them from the crime, and the infamy, of breaking up our 
national Union : for how would they have stood before the 
world at this day, if tliat Union had perished by the fire 
which they were kindling? Why, they would have been an 
object of universal execration ! a mark of abhorrence to 
coming time, as the philantliroj^ic incendiaries who had de- 
stroyed the last hope of republican institutions upon Earth ! 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 4/ 

This, then, is the revenge that Webster has taken upon 
them, — he served their own cause far better than they did 
themselves. While they were warring against him, he was 
preparing victory for them. He did not know this, they did 
not know it ; but he was doing right, they were doing wrong : 
he was acting from love, they were acting from hate : he was 
trying to make peace, they were trying to break peace, be- 
tween the North and the South : they, to be sure, succeeded 
for a time, but his success was the more lasting : and, in my 
copy of the Bible the seventh of the Divine Beatitudes does 
not read '' Blessed are the \>Q^cQ-dreakers,^^ nor do I think 
it ought to read so. And do you not believe, — do you not 
kfiow, — that Daniel Webster really did more towards smash- 
ing up slavery than all the Abolitionists in the country put 
together ? It need not be said that slavery was killed ; that 
is pretty evident : but I think it may need to be said, at all 
events it shall be said, that Daniel Webster was the man who 
killed it ; not, I repeat, from hatred of slavery, but from love 
of the Union : yes, he, he was the Hercules who slew the 
monster, and saved the lady ! And may we not reasonably 
hope that the day is not far distant, when a just sense of his 
vast service in this behalf shall purge the moral and social 
atmosphere of Boston, and of Massachusetts, of the dreadful 
venom and virulence breathed into it more than thirty years 
ago? 

Ladies and Gentlemen, great cause have we to thank God 
for the gift of Daniel Webster to this Nation, and to bless the 
day when he w^as born. I think, withal, we may rest assured 
that he still lives, and is not ^oing to die. His memory will 
out-tongue and live down whatever has hitherto tried, or may 
hereafter try, to choke it off; his name will still be fresh and 



48 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

fragrant in the world's regard, when all the lingual rancours 
which so embittered his closing years shall have died away in 
blank forgetfulness. He had " a voice whose sound was like 
the sell " ; and that voice will keep swelling up and rolling 
on, strong, clear, and sweet, ages after the unbenevolent 
shriekings of his tinie, and of our time, shall have gone silent 
for ever, Nature's air refusing to propagate them ; a treasure 
to be cherished with reverential affection so long as the 
American name shall have a place in the reverence and affec- 
tion of mankind. For, indeed, it is already coming to be 
seen, as it has never been seen before, that his broad, wise 
statesmanship is to be the ample and refreshing shade, his 
character the bright and breezy Presence, in which all the 
members of this great and illustrious Republic may meet and 
sit down and feast together. 



APPENDIX 



-•o^ 



No. I. 

The speech made by Governor Long, at the dinner given 
by the Marshficld Club in commemoration of Webster's hun- 
dredth birtli-day, is so manly, so able, so workmanlike, and 
so eloquent in itself, therewithal so just to the subject, and 
so honourable to the speaker, that I cannot well resist the 
temptation to transcribe it here, in a place more convenient 
for preservation and reference than in the newspaper columns 
where it appeared : 

" It is but a poor tribute that even the most eloquent 
voice, least of all mine, can pay for Massachusetts to the 
memory of her greatest statesman, her mightiest intellect, 
and her most {powerful orator. Among her sons he towers 
like the lonely and massive shaft on Bunker Hill, upon the 
base and the crest of which his name is emblazoned clearer 
than if chiselled deep in its granite cubes. For years he was 
her synonym. Among the States he sustained her at that 
proud height, which Winthrop and Sam. Adams gave her in 
the colonial and provincial days. With what matchless 
grandeur he defended her ! With what overwhelming power 
he impressed her convictions upon the national life ! God 
seems to ai)point men to special work, and, that done, the 
very effort of its achievement exhausts them, and they rise 
not again to the summit of their meridian. So it was with 
Webster. He knows little even of written constitutions and 

49 



50 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

frames of government who does not know that tliey exist 
ahiiost less in the letter than in the interpretation and con- 
struction of the letter. In this light it is not too much to say 
that the Constitution of the United States, as it existed when 
it carried our country througli the greatest peril that ever 
tested it, was the crystallization of the mind of Webster as 
well as of its original framers. It came from them, and was 
only accepted by some of our own, as a compact of States, 
sovereign in all but certain enumerated powers delegated to 
a central government. He made it the crucible of a welded 
Union, — ■ the charter of one great country, the United States 
of America. He made the States a Nation and enfolded 
them in its single banner. It was the overwhelming logic of 
his discussion, the household familiarity of his simple but 
irresistible statement, that gave us munition to fight the war 
for the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery. 
It was his eloquence, clear as crystal, and precipitating itself 
in the school-books and literature of a people, which had 
trained up the generation of twenty years ago to regard this 
Nation as one, to love its flag with a patriotism that knew no 
faction or section, to be loyal to the whole country, and to 
find in its Constitution power to suppress any hand or com- 
bination raised against it. The great rebellion of 1861 went 
down hardly more before the cannon of Grant and Farragut 
than the thunder of Webster's reply to Hayne. He knew 
not the extent of his own achievement. His greatest failure 
was, that he rose not to the height and actual stroke of his 
own resistless argument, and that he lacked the sublimed 
inspiration, the disentanglement and the courage, to let the 
giant he had created go upon his errand, first of force, and 
then, through that, of surer peace. He had put the work 
and the genius of more than an ordinary life-time of service 



APPENDIX. 51 

into the arching and knitting of the Union, and this he could 
not bear to put to the final test : his great heart was sincere 
in the pi*ayer that his eyes might not behold the earthquake 
that would shake it to those foundations which, though he 
knew it not, he had made so strong that a succeeding gener- 
ation saw them stand the shock as the oak withstands the 
storm. ]\Ien are not gods, and it needed in him that he 
should rise to a moral sublimity anei daring as lofty as the 
intellectual heights above which he soared with unequalled 
strength. So had he been godlike. 

'• A great man touches the heart of the people as well as 
their intelligence. They not only admire, they also love 
him. It sometimes seems as if they sought in him some 
weakness of our common human nature, that they may 
chide him for it, forgive it, and so endear him to them- 
selves the more. Massachusetts had her friction with the 
younger Adams only to lay him away with profounder honour, 
and to remember him devotedly as the defender of the right 
of petition and ' the old man eloquent.' She forgave the 
overweening conceit of Sumner; she revoked her unjust 
censure of him, and now points her youth to him in his 
high niche as the unsullied patriot, without fear and without 
reproach, who stood and spoke for equal rights, and whose 
last great service was to demand and enforce his country's 
just claims against the dishonourable trespass of the cruisers 
of that England he had so much admired. Massachusetts 
smote, too, and broke the heart of Webster, her idol, and 
then broke her own above his grave, and to-day writes his 
name highest upon her roll of statesmen. It seems dis- 
jointed to say that, with such might as his, the impression 
that comes from his face upon the wall, as from his silhouette 
upon the background of our history, is that of sadness, — the 



52 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

sadness of the great deep eyes, the sadness of the lonely 
shore he loved, and by which he sleeps. The story of 
Webster from the beginning is the very pathos of romance. 
A minor chord runs through it like the tenderest note in a 
song. What eloquence of tears is in that narrative, which 
reveals in this giant of intellectual strength the heart, the 
single, loving heart of a child, and in which he describes 
the winter sleigh-ride up the New Hampshire hills when his 
father told liim that, at whatever cost, he should have a col- 
lege education, and he, too full to speak, while a warm glow 
ran all over him, laid his head upon his father's shoulder and 
wept ! 

" The greatness of Webster and his title to enduring grati- 
tude have two illustrations. He taught the people of the 
United States, in the simplicity of common understanding, 
the principles of the Constitution and government of the 
country, and he wrought for them, in a style of matchless 
strength and beauty, the literature of statesmanship. From 
his lips flowed the discussion of constitutional law, of eco- 
nomic philosophy, of finance, of international right, of national 
grandeur, and of tlie whole range of high public themes, so 
clear and judicial that it was no longer discussion, but judg- 
ment. To-day, and so it will be while the Republic endures, 
the student and the legislator turn to the full fountain of his 
statement for the enunciation of these principles. What 
other authority is quoted or holds even the second or thirtl 
place? Even his words have imbedded themselves in the 
common phraseology, and come to the tongue like pas- 
sages from the psalms or the poets. I do not know that 
a sentence or a word of Sumner's repeats itself in our 
everyday parlance. The exquisite periods of Everett are 
recalled like the consummate work of some master of music, 



APPENDIX. 53 

but no note or refrain sings itself over and ov^r again to our 
ears. The brilliant eloquence of Choate is like the flash of 
a bursting rocket, lingering upon the retina indeed after it 
has faded from the wings of the night, but as elusive of our 
grasp as spray-drops that glisten in the sun. The fiery 
enthusiasm of Andrew did, indeed, burn some of his heart- 
beats for ever into the sentiment of Massachusetts ; but 
Webster made his language the very household words of a 
nation. They are the library of a people. They inspired 
and still inspire patriotism. They taught and still teach 
loyalty. They are the school-book of the citizen. They are 
the inwrought and accepted fibre of American politics. If 
the temple of our Republic shall ever fall, they will 'still 
live ' above the ground, like those great foundation-stones in 
ancient ruins, which remain in lonely grandeur, unburied 
in the dust that springs to turf over all else, and making men 
wonder from what rare quarry and by what mighty force they 
came. To Webster, almost more than to any other man, — 
nay, at a distance and in the generous spirit of this occasion 
it is hard to discriminate among the lustrous names which 
now cluster at tlie gates of Heaven, as the golden bars mass 
the West at sunset, — yet to Webster especially of them all is 
it due that to-day, wherever a son of the United States, at 
home or abroad, ' beholds the gorgeous ensign of the Repub- 
lic, now known and honoured throughout the Earth, still full 
high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their orig- 
inal lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star 
obscured,' he can utter a prouder boast than Cms Romanus 
sum. For he can say, I am an American citizen,^'' 



54 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

No. 11. 
WEBSTER AND GIDDINGS. 

To THE Editor of the Transcript : The Transcript of 
the 25th instant prints a communication from Mr. F. B. San- 
born, of Concord, which has caused me not a Httle surprise. 
It contains a letter from the Hon. J. R. Giddings, formerly 
a representative in Congress from Ohio, to the Rev. Theo- 
dore Parker. A part of that letter is as follows : 

" Hall of Representatives, Jan. 29, 1853. 
" My Dear Sir : You may recollect that, early in the session 
of Congress of 1847-48, the absorbing subject of the presidential 
candidates was much agitated. Mr. Webster had a few friends, 
but it became apparent that his prospect for nomination was 
not good. I took occasion to suggest to seme of his friends 
that Mr. Webster might yet place himself in a most enviable 
position by taking ground in fivour of liberty, and against the 
encroachments of slavery. I did this with the hope of bringing 
him out on that subject, as I knew that his talents and influence 
would do much for the advancement of our cause. Soon after 
this, at a party, Mr. W^ebster informed me that he desired to 
submit a question for my opinion, on which he wished me to be 
very frank. Accordingly, a few days afterward, the skeleton of 
a speech, in his handwriting, was submitted to my inspection. 
It took ground in favour of Northern rights and against the en- 
croachments of slavery. I expressed approval, and, for a long 
time, expected its delivery in the Senate." 

It will be seen that this letter was written at least four 
years after the session of Congress to which it refers. Surely 
Mr. Giddings must have overlooked or forgotten two very 
remarkable speeches made by Webster: one on the ist of 
March, 1847, ^^^^ entitled The Mexican War ; the other on 



APPENDIX. 55 

the 23d of March, 1848, and entitled Objects of the Mexican 
War. Both speeches are given in the fifth vokuTie of Web- 
ster's Works, Little & Brown's edition, 1S51. I hope you 
will not find it inconvenient to print a few extracts from 
those speeches, in justice to all the parties concerned. In 
the first of them we have the following : 

" At present, I should hardly have risen but to lay before the 
Senate the resolutions of the House of Representatives of Massa- 
chusetts, adopted on Thursday last. We have a great deal of 
commentary and criticism on State resolutions brought here. 
Those of Michigan particularly have been very sharply and nar- 
rowly looked into, to see whether they really mean what they 
seem to mean. These resolutions of Massachusetts, I hope, are 
sufficiently distinct and decided. They admit of neither doubt 
nor cavil, even if doubt or cavil were permissible in such a case. 

'• What the legislature of Massachusetts thinks, it has said, 
and said plainly and directly. I have not, before any tribunal, 
tried my ingenuity at what the lawyers call a special demurrer for 
many years ; and I never tried it here in the Senate. In the 
business of legislation, and especially in considering State reso- 
lutions and the proceedings of public assemblies, it is our duty, 
of course, to understand every thing according to the common 
meaning of the words used. Of all occasions, these are the last 
in which one should stick in the bark, or seek for loopholes, or 
means of escape ; or, in the language of an eminent judge of 
former times, ' hitch and hang on pins and particles.'' We 
must take the substance fairly, and as it is, and not hesitate 
about forms and phrases. 

" We are in the midst of a war, not waged at home in defence 
of our soil, but waged a thousand miles off, and in the heart of 
the territories of another Government. It is not denied that this 
war is now prosecuted for the acquisition of territory ; at least, 
if any deny it, others admit it, and all know it to be true. Seven 
or eight of the free States, comprising some of the largest, have 
remonstrated against the prosecution of the war for such a pur- 



56 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

pose, in language suited to their meaning. These remonstrances 
come here whh the distinct and jDrecise object of dissuading us 
from the further prosecution of the war for the acquisition of ter- 
ritory by conquest. Before territory is actually obtained, and its 
future character fixed, they beseech us to give up an object so 
full of danger. One and all, they protest against the extension 
of slave territory; one and all, they regard it as the solemn duty 
of the Representatives of the free States to take security, in ad- 
vance, that no more slave States shall be added to the Union. 
They demand of us this i^ledge, this assurance, before the pur- 
chase-money is paid, or the bargain concluded.*' 

Then, after reading tlie ^lassacbusetts resolutions, Webster 
went on as follows : 

" The House of Representatives of Massachusetts i.^, I believe, 
the most numerous legislative body in the country. On this 
occasion it was not full ; but among those present there Avas an 
entire unanimity. For the resolutions there were two hundred 
and thirty votes ; against them, none. Not one man stood up 
to justify the war upon such grounds as those upon which it has 
been, from day to day, defended here. Massachusetts, without 
one dissenting voice, and I thank her for it, and am proud of her 
for it, has denounced the whole object for which our armies are 
now traversing the plains of Mexico, or about to plunge into the 
pestilence of her coasts. The people of Massachusetts are as 
unanimous as the members of her legislature, and so are her 
Representatives here. I have heard no man in the State, in pub- 
lic or in private life, express a different opinion. If any thing 
is certain, it is certain tliat the sentiment of the whole North 
is utterly opposed to the acquisition of territory, to be formed 
into slave-holding States, and, as such, admitted into the Union. 

" But here, Sir, I cannot but pause. I am arrested by occur- 
rences of this night, which, I confess, fill me with alarm. They 
are ominous, portentous. Votes which have just been passed 
by majorities here cannot fail to awaken pul)lic attention. Every 



APPENDIX. 5^ 

patriotic American, every man who wishes to preserve the Con- 
stitution, ought to ponder them well. . . . 

" Mr. President, I arraign no men and no parties. I take no 
judgment into my own hands. But I present this simple state- 
ment of facts and consequences to the country, and ask for it, 
humbly but most earnestly, the serious consideration of the peo- 
ple. Shall we prosecute this war for the purpose of bringing on 
a controversy which is likely to shake the Government to its 
centre? . . . 

"Within a year or two after Texas had achieved her inde- 
pendence, there were those who already spoke of its annexation 
to the United States. Against that project I felt it to be my 
duty to take an early and a decided course. Having occasion to 
address political friends in the city of New York in March, 1837, I 
expressed my sentiments as fully and as strongly as I could. From 
those opinions I have never swerved. From the first I saw noth- 
ing but danger to arise to the country frpm such annexation. . . . 
"Sir, I fear we are not yet arrived at the beginning of the 
end. I pretend to see but Httle into the future, and that little 
affords no gratification. All I can scan is contention, strife, and 
agitation. Before we obtain a perfect right to conquered terri- 
tory, there must be a cession. A cession can only be made by 
treaty. Will the North consent to a treaty bringing in territory 
subject to slavery? Will the South consent to a treaty bringing 
in territory from which slavery is excluded? Sir, the future is 
full of difiiculties and full of dangers. We are suffering to pass 
the golden opportunity for securing harmony and the stability of 
the Constitution. We appear to me to be rushing upon perils 
headlong, and with our eyes wide open. But I put my trust in 
Providence, and in that good sense and patriotism of the people 
which will yet, I hope, be awakened before it is too late." 

Still more emphatic, if possible, are the following passages 
from the speech made a little more than a year later : 

" On Friday a bill passed the Senate for raising ten regiments 
of new troops for the further prosecution of the war against 



58 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

Mexico ; and we have been informed that that measure is shortly 
to be followed, in this branch of the legislature, by a bill to raise 
twenty regiments of volunteers for the same service. I was 
desirous of expressing my opinions against the object of these 
bills, against the supposed necessity which leads to their enact- 
ment, and against the general policy which they are apparently 
designed to promote. Circumstances personal to myself, but 
beyond my control, compelled me to forego, on that day, the 
execution of that design. . . . 

" This war was waged for the object of creating new States, 
on the southern border of the United States, out of Mexican ter- 
ritory, and with such population as could be found resident 
thereupon. I have opposed this object. I am against all acces- 
sions of territory to form new States. And this is no matter of 
sentimentality, which I am to parade before mass-meetings or 
before my constituents at home. It is not a matter with me of 
declamation, or of regret, or of expressed repugnance. It is a 
matter of firm, unchangeable purpose. I yield nothing to the 
force of circumstances that have occurred, or that I can consider 
as likely to occur. I therefore say. Sir, that, if I were asked 
to-day whether, for the sake of peace, I would take a treaty for 
addins: two new States to the Union on our southern border, I 
would say TVi?.' distinctly, No! And I wish every man in the 
United States to understand that to be my judgment and my 
purpose. . . . 

" Just before the commencement of the present administration, 
the resolutions for the annexation of Texas were passed in Con- 
gress. Texas complied with the provisions of those resolutions, 
and was here, or the case was here, on the 22d day of December, 
1845, for her final admission into the Union as one of the States. 
I took occasion then to say that I thought there must be some 
limit to the extent of our territories, and that I wished this coun- 
try should exhibit to the world the example of a powerful repub- 
lic, without greediness or hunger of empire. And I added that, 
while I held with as much faithfulness as any citizen of the coun- 
try to all the original arrangements and compromises of the Con- 



APPENDIX. 59 

stitution under which we live, I never could, and I never should, 
bring myself to be in favour of the admission of any States into 
the Union as slave-holding States. . . . 

"If you bring in new States, any State that comes in must 
have two Senators. She may come in with fifty or sixty thou- 
sand people, or more. You may have from a particular State 
more Senators than you have Representatives. Can any thing 
occur to disfigure and derange the form of government under 
which we live more signally than that? The Senate, augmented 
by these new Senators coming from States where there are few 
people, becomes an odious oligarchy. It holds power without 
any adequate constituency. . . . 

" Sir, I hardly dare trust myself. I don''t know but that I may 
be under some delusion. It may be the weakness of my eyes 
that forms this monstrous apparition. But, if I may trust myself, 
if I can persuade myself that I am in my right mind, then it does 
appear to me that we in this Senate have been and are acting, 
and are likely to be acting hereafter, and immediately, a part 
which will form the most remarkable epoch in the history of our 
country. I hold it to be enormous, flagrant, an outrage upon all 
the principles of popular republican government, and on the 
elementary provisions of the Constitution under which we live, 
and which we have sworn to support. . . . 

"I think I see a course adopted which is likely to turn the 
Constitution of the land into a deformed monster, into a curse 
rather than a blessing ; in fact, a frame of an unequal govern- 
ment, not founded on popular representation, not founded on 
equality, but on the grossest inequality ; and I think that this 
process will go on, or that there is da7iger that it will go on, 
until this Union shall fall to pieces. I resist it, to-day and always. 
Whoever falters or whoever flies, I continue the contest ! 

" I know, Sir, that all the portents are discouraging. Would 
to God I could auspicate good influences ! Would to God that 
those who think with me, and myself, could hope for stronger 
support ! Would that we could stand where we desire to stand ! 
I see the signs are sinister. But with few, or alone, my posi- 



60 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

tion is fixed. If there were time I would gladly awaken the 
country. I believe the country might be awakened, although 
it may be too late. For myself, supported or unsupported, by 
the blessing of God, I shall do my duty. I see well enough all 
the adverse indications. But I am sustained by a deep and 
conscientious sense of duty; and, while supported by that feel- 
ing, and while such great interests are at stake, I defy auguries, 
and ask no omen but my country's cause ! " 

Mr. Sanborn thinks, as he well may, that the alleged dis- 
honest change in Webster's course, about which so much 
has been said, was not connected with the speech he made 
on the yth of March, 1850, but with a speech which he did 
not make some time in 1847 ^^ 1848. The letter which 
Mr. Sanborn gives, from Mr. Sumner to Mr. Parker, is with- 
out date ; but that letter evidently refers also to some speech 
that Webster did not make against the Mexican war. A 
part of Mr. Sumner's letter is as follows : " At the Senate I 
spoke witli Giddings. He repeated what he had told me 
before, that Webster had submitted to him the brief of a 
speech against the Mexican war, which he never delivered." 
Now, wdiether Webster ever delivered the particular speech 
here referred to may be a question. But I submit that he 
could not well have made any fuller or stronger declarations 
against admitting any new slave-holding States and against 
all extension of slavery than we have in the forecited pas- 
sages from his speeches in 1847 ^^^<^ 1848. Surely these 
passages must be enough to satisfy any candid and fair- 
minded man, that Webster did not then shirk the honest 
expression of his mind, from what Mr. Sumner was pleased 
to call "the paltriness of his office-seeking." 

Probably the speech which Webster did not deliver, and 
of which a " skeleton " Nvas shown to Mr, Giddings, was the 
one referred to in one of the forecited passages from the 



APPENDIX. 6l 

speech of March 23, 1848: "I was desirous of expressing 
my opinions against the object of these bills," &c., (page 
58). And is not the reason which he there assigns, for not 
having made that intended speech, sufficient? especially in 
view of the speech he made on the 23d of March, 1848? 
One would think that even an unbenevolent mind might be 
satisfied with that reason. 

Now, as nearly all the South were at that time manifestly 
bent on conquering new territory for the sole purpose of 
extending slavery, Webster, in his earnest and repeated pro- 
tests and warnings against such extension, certainly had a 
very funny way of truckling, or of selling himself, for Southern 
votes. And as the imputing of bad motives, save " under a 
compelling occasion," is not generally regarded as a very 
high act of virtue, therefore we are bound in charity to pre- 
sume that Mr. Sumner was strictly compelled to impute bad 
motives in that particular case. But it seems not unlikely 
that his undated letter to Mr. Parker may have been written 
before Webster's delivery of the speech which he had been 
obliged to postpone. Be that as it may, Mr. Sanborn had 
of course a perfect right to overlook or ignore the facts 
belonging to the matter in hand, and then speak just as if 
those facts were non-existent. For it is clearly indispensable 
that Webster's character should somehow be put to death ; 
and, where the end is so high and holy, it is evidently not 
worth the while to be at all scrupulous as to the means. 
Finally, in the case of Webster, liberal men, to be sure, must 
be allowed the special privilege of drawing upon their own 
imagination for the facts touching his action, and upion their 
own generous hearts, or tJicij- '' inner consciousness," for his 
motives. ^ ^^ pj 

Cambridge, Jan.. 1882. 



62 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 



No. III. 

At an anniversary meeting of the Massachusetts Anti- 
slavery Society, held in Faneuil Hall, on the 23d and 24th 
of January, 1850, a series of resolutions was adopted, one of 
which is as follows : 

'■'■ Resolved, That, admiring the fearlessness, the fidelity to 
principle, and the just discernment of slavery's true nature, and 
its chief strongholds, manifested by the great convention of 
Ohio's sons and daughters, assembled in September last at Ber- 
lin, in that State, we, the members and friends of the Massachu- 
setts Antislavery Society, assembled in Faneuil Hall, do cordially 
respond to their words, and say with them, With full confidence 
in the integrity of our purpose and the justice of our cause, we do 
hereby declare ourselves the enemies of the Constitution, Union, 
and Government of the United States, and the friends of the new 
Confederacy of States, where there shall be no union with slave- 
holders, but where there shall ever be free soil, free labour, and 
free men ; and we proclaim it as our unalterable purpose and 
determination to live and labour for a dissolution of the present 
Union, by all lawful and just, though bloodless and pacific means, 
and for the formation of a new republic, that shall be such, not 
in name only, but in full living reality and truth. And we do 
hereby invite and entreat all our fellow-citizens and the friends 
of justice, humanity, and true liberty throughout the Northern 
States, to unite with us in labouring for so glorious an object." 

Many pages might easily be filled with matter just like the 
above, all plainly demonstrating that the Abolitionists were 
at that time fierce disunionists, as much so as the " fire- 
eaters " of the South ; and that the former, in common with 
the latter, were pushing on, with all their might, a scheme 
of " peaceable secession." How likely such secession was 
to be peaceable, was charmingly shown by our four smilingly- 



APPENDIX. 6^, 

peaceful years of civil war. Tlie Abolitionists were then 
feeding themselves with eager hopes of a speedy disruption 
or "dissolution" of the Union. Those hopes were badly 
dashed by the passing of the Compromise Measures, which 
took -place just when their patriotic and philanthropic fervour 
was at the white-heat of intensity. This abundantly explains 
their amiable and benevolent virulence against Webster ; for 
''Death loves a shining mark." To be sure, they had loved 
Webster mightily when he opposed Nullification and Seces- 
sion in South Carolina ; but they hated him with inexpressi- 
ble bitterness when he opposed the same thing in Massachu- 
setts : the case was then altered completely, of course ; and 
so their milk instantaneously somersaulted into gall 1 

Upon a fair and candid view of the whole matter, the 
upshot seems to be about this : Webster was conscientiously 
loyal, the Abolitionists were conscientiously disloyal, to the 
Union and the Constitution; he thought the Union ought 
to be preserved, they thought it ought to be destroyed. 
Conscience was of course to be respected in them ; and why 
not as much so in him? AVisdom, also, or moderation, if 
they had possessed it, would have been worthy of respect in 
them ; Webster did possess it, and in him it was worthy of 
respect. In other words, the Abolitionists were honest, but 
they were fanatics ; Webster, also, was honest, and was not a 
fanatic : this was just the difference between them. 'So, too, 
the pro-slavery fanatics of the South were no doubt just as 
honest as the anti-slavery fanatics of the North : on both 
sides the honesty was good; the fanaticism on both sides 

was bad. 

One word more. The Abolitionists were eager and impa- 
patient to run the risk of setting the whole Nation on fire, 
in order to purge off a local and long-standing nuisance, 



64 WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 

which it was indeed unspeakably desirable to get rid of: 
Webster was deeply and most honourably anxious that the 
nuisance should be al)ated, as he believed it might and would 
be in time, without wrapping the Nation in llames. And, 
when the crisis came, the people of the North proved to be 
so for in sympathy with him. that they preferred an almost 
desperate civil war to the downfall of the Union. It is also 
to be said, in praise of the Abolitionists generally, that, when 
they found, as they did find, that the cause of the Union 
might become, and was likely to become, a mighty force for 
the destruction of slavery, they fell in heartily with the rest, 
cast off their disloyalty to the Union, turned earnest patriots, 
and worked nobly, none more so, in support of that cause. 
And it has really long seemed to me that, now that the strug- 
gle is a thing of the past, and passion has had time to cool, 
the old Abolitionists, above all other people in the land, 
frankly discarding the animosities of tliirty years ago, ought 
to love and honour the name of Daniel Webster. Surely 
they owe him that reparation ; and tlicy owe it c\'en more to 
themselves than to him ! And I am the rather moved to say 
this, inasmuch as, during those long-past years, I was myself 
in full sympathy with their hatred of slavery. 



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tioned OLD EDITION is put up in 6 and 12 volumes. 

We copy the following from an article in the Boston Sunday 
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mentioned above : — 

" It was in 185 1 that his (Hudson's) first edition of * Shakespeare's 
Plays' appeared in 11 volumes, after the form and style of the Chis- 
wick edition of 1 826. It was the first time that, properly speaking, the 
Poet's text had been edited in this country. The edition, so far as 
the text went, was extemporised. Its chief value was in its notes 
and introductions. When Mr. Richard Grant White's edition 
appeared in 1865, to use Mr. Hudson's own words, he 'beat me all 
to pieces.' 'Now,' he adds, referring to the Harvard edition of 
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as much as he then beat me.' 

" In 1870 Ginn & Heath became his publishers, and brought out 
his ' School Shakespeare ' in three volumes, containing seven plays 
each. In 1872 he put into two volumes the substance of his earlier 
volumes on ' Shakespeare's Characters,' revising, condensing, rewrit- 
ing his earlier work, parts of which he had outgrown, and presenting 
his final opinions under the title of ' Shakespeare's Life, Art, 
AND Characters.' 

" It was felt by his publishers and friends, quite as much as by 
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page such notes as elucidate linguistic 
difF.culties or obsolete allusions, and 
throwing the textual criticisms into a 
body at the end of the play, is an ex- 
cellent scheme. And while in the former 
there is no "shirking," the text being 
made " plain as way to parish church," 
so far as the researches of the best 
scholarship allow, they are as free from 
pedantry as from dulness. Mr. Hud- 
son's style is unique in its piquancy and 



its vigor ; and he keeps his readers on 
the qui vive from first to last. And so 
in the " Critical Notes," every change 
from the old copies is remarked, and 
the reasons for the text selected are .set 
forth without dogmatism or any of that 
abuse of fellow-commentators that dis- 
figures our old Shakespeares. With 
the " Harvard " edition, and the editor's 
"Life, Art, and Characters of Shake- 
speare," any reader will find himself 
thoroughly equipped for the intelligent 
study, textual and aesthetic, of the great 
dramatist. These books contain the 
results of a long life's sympathetic de- 
votion to Shakespeare ; they are an im- 
perishable monument to Mr. Hudson, 
a credit to your house, and an honor to 
America to have produced them ; and 
I sincerely hope they will find, as they 
richly merit, an appreciative and world- 
wide circulation. 

Mr. F. J. Furnivall's Introduc- 
tion to " The Leopold Shakespeare" : In 
Shakespearian criticism, Gervinus of 
Heidelberg, Dovvden of Dublin, and 
Hudson of Boston, are the student's 
best guides that we have in English 
speech. 

Prof. DoTVden, Dublin : Hudson's 
edition takes its place beside the best 
work of English Shakespeare students. 

London Athenasuna : Mr. Hud- 
son's volumes deserve to find a place 
in every library devoted to Shake- 
speare, to editions of his works, to his 
biography, and to the works of com- 
mentators. 

Mr. H. H. Purness: I cannot 
refrain from recording my thorough 
admiration for Mr, Hudson's aesthetic 
criticisms. No Shakespeare student 
can afford to overlook them. 

New York Tribune : As an in- 
terpreter of Shakespeare, imbued with 
the vital essence of the great English 



dramatist, and equally qualified by in- 
sight and study to penetrate the deepest 
significance of his writings, it would be 
difficult to name an English or Ameri- 
can scholar who can be compared with 
the editor of this edition. Not even 
Mr. Coleridge, or the late R. H. Dana, 
the great masters in Shakespearian 
criticism, and to whom Mr. Hudson 
would not disown discipleship, have 
evinced a more subtle comprehension 
of the finer sense of the many-sided 
bard, or have given a more vigorous 
and pregnant utterance to their con- 
ceptions of his meaning. His com- 
mentary is a study of profound and 
delicate thought. Every sentence is 
richly freighted with ideas, which afford 
the seeds of precious intellectual ac- 
quisitions, and the suggestions of noble 
methods in the conduct of life. 

Hon. George S. Hillard : When 
any one differs from Mr. Hudson's con- 
clusions, it behooves him to examine 
well the grounds of his dissent. Mr. 
Hudson is an independent and original 
thinker, and no mere transmuter of 
another man's metal. His tone of mind 
is philosophical. We cannot read any- 
where a dozen pages of these volumes 
without admitting that we are convers- 
ing with a thinker, and not merely a 
scholar. We recognize everywhere a 
peculiar and characteristic flavor. Mr. 
Hudson's views, be they deemed right 
or wrong, sound or unsound, are un- 
borrowed. They are coined in his own 
mint, and bear his image and super- 
scription. 

Mr. Joseph Crosby, Z.anesville, 
O. : The explanatory notes are, where 
of course they ought always to be, at 
the foot of the page ; they give what 
the editor understands to be the correct 
explanations at once ; and do not puzzle 
readers with a lot of variorum explana- 
tions, and leave them, unaided, to select 
for themselves which are the true ones. 
And I like his style too. It is fresh, 



original, and pungent. He is deter- 
mined that none of his readers shall go 
to sleep over his notes and monographs. 

Mr. E. P. Whipple : Gervinus, the 
greatest Shakespearian critic of Ger- 
many, has recognized Hudson as a man 
whose opinions are to be admitted or 
controverted, as he admits or contro- 
verts the judgments of Schlegel and 
Ulrici, of Johnson, Coleridge, Lamb, 
and Hazlitt. His is the most thoughtful 
and intelligent interpretative criticism 
which has, during the present century, 
been written, either in English or Ger- 
man. Hudson on " Shakespeare " is an 
authority, just as Agassiz is an authority 
in zoology. Mr. Hudson has none of 
the pedantry of many students of Shake- 
.spearian lore, while he is brimful of its 
substance and spirit. He writes boldly 
and independently, but he is not self- 
opinionated. He is reverential as well 
as intrepid. He is never dull ; but he 
does not escape dulness through pert- 
ness or shallowness. His great object 
is to educate people into a solid knowl- 
edge of Shakespeare as well as to 
quicken their love for him ; and in this 
educational purpose he aims to delight 
the readers he instructs. It is in the 
analysis of Shakespeare's characters 
that Mr. Hudson puts forth all his force 
and subtlety of thought. They have 
been so long his mental companions, 
acquaintances, or friends, that he almost 
forgets the fact that they are not actual 
beings, however much they may be 
" real " beings. He shows that Shake- 
speare's characters have so taken real 
existence in his mind, that he uncon- 
sciously speaks of them as one speaks 
of persons he daily meets. This is the 
charm of his criticisins. Even when his 
analysis breaks up the characters into 
their elements, and shows that they are 
not so much individual spcciinens of 
human nature as vividly individualized 
classes of human nature, he still never 
loses sight of their personality. His an- 
alysis of the great characters of Shake- 



speare, whether serious or comic, is so 
keen and true, that it cannot but give 
new and fresh ideas to the most diligent 
student of the Poet. In his expositions 
of the female characters of Shakespeare 
he is uniformly excellent. The ideal 
beauty of these types of womanhood 
has never had a more genial and deli- 
cate interpreter. The minor characters 
also have full justice done them. 

The Congre nationalist : His 
scholarly ability and experience as a 
student of Shakespeare placv any such 
work from his pen in the front rank. 
Whatever reading or comment has the 
weight of his authority behind it, has 
therein a strong presumption in its favor. 

F. J. Child, Prof, of E77i^. Lit., 
Harvard College: A best edition of 
Shakespeare I have always been at a 
loss to recommend. As yet I have not 
gone very far into this new work of Mr. 
Hudson's, but my first impression is 
that this may safely be called the very 
best edition. {May 24, iSSi.) 

Cyrus Northrop, Prof, of Efig. 
Lit., Yale College: Prof. Hudson has 
done much to make the study of Shake- 
speare attractive ; and I cannot better 
show my appreciation of his good sense, 
his correct judgment, and his skilful 
analysis of character, as well as of his 
learning, than by saying that his is one 
of the editions required in my classes. 
( Oct. ig, 188 J.) 

Dr. A. P. Peabody, Harvard 
Coll. : As I have already said, in print 
and in private speech, I regard the 
edition as unequalled in Shakespearian 
scholarship, and in its worth in the 
library and for current use ; and I yield 
to no one in the highest regard for the 
editor. {May 23, 1S81.) 

Boston Advertiser: Taking all 
things into account, the historical in- 
troductions, the marginal and critical 



notes, the convenient size of the vol- 
umes, and the careful and accurate 
typography, we know of no edition of 
Shakespeare so satisfactory for constant 
use. The " Harvard " edition deserves 
to become the standard edition for ad- 
mirers and students of Shakespeare in 
this corner of the world. 

Springfield Republican : Char- 
acterized by loving enthusiasm, ripe 
scholarship, terse and comprehensive 
explanations of obscure passages and 
dubious words, and able historical and 
critical comment. The introductions. 
to the various plays are indeed valuable 
helps to the student, full of the informa- 
tion which years of special instruction 
have taught the editor to be mosr suited 
to the needs of the student and general 
reader, without taking from him the de- 
sire to search further for himself, and of 
the critical acumen which has marked 
him as first among America's Shake- 
spearian scholars. 

Zion's Herald, Boston : In purity 
of text and in intelligent annotation this 
edition has no superior. 

The Churchman, A^. Y. : It is his 
merit to give the results of scholarship 
and learning rather than the processes 
by which they are reached, and, as a 
consequence, he does not overload his 
text ; nor does he waste time in explain- 
ing what is already obvious and clear, 
— he holds no farthing candle to the 
sun. Unlike many editors, he brings 
his author and not himself to the front, 
and is himself silent where the great 
high priest of nature speaks. The great 
dramatist was the master of all learning, 
" a poet soaring in the high reason of 
his fancies, with his garland and sing- 
ing robes about him," and when the sun 
is full high advanced in the heavens, 
before him all lesser lights must pale. 
It is in this reverent spirit that Mr, 
Hudson does his work. The notes of 
Mr. Hudson enable us to discover new 



beauties, and this edition of Shake- 
speare, with its clear type, handsome 
paper, and modest binding, commends 
itself to us by a thousand charms. 

Washing-ton Post : The " Har- 
vard Shakespeare" is destined to be- 
come the standard popular edition oi 
the great dramatic poet. There is no 
better Shakespearian scholar in the 
country than Prof. Hudson, and upon 
this work he has exhausted the re- 
searches of a lifetime. In beauty of 
letterpress, legibility of type, conven- 
ience of arrangement, and copiousness 
of notes, there is no Shakespeare to 
compare with it. 

Christian Register, Boston : We 
are not alone in approving this edition, 
for our praise of Mr. Hudson's work 
has been more moderate than that of 
many of the critics. The man who 
reads for enjoyment, desirous of gain- 
ing also a fair knowledge of the mean- 
ing of Shakespeare, need not find him- 
self ignorant after giving attention to 
what the author has to say in illustration 
of the text. In every way the edition 
is a credit to editor and publishers, and 
may well stand as the monument of a 
lifetime of loving devotion to the great- 
est of English poets. There is enough 
for the general reader, and not too 
much. Every reasonable question is 
answered, and few but special students 
will care to go deeper into the critical 
questions which are raised at every 
step. 

The Commonwealth, Boston : 
Careful research, critical analysis, intel- 
ligent comment, judicious notes, and 
admirable text. A lifetime of thought 
and investigation is embraced in the 
preparation of the critical matter, and 
the suggestions are worthy of respect 
from all readers of the great bard. 

New England Journal of Edu- 
cation, Boston : Whoever is fortunate 



enough to possess the " Harvard Edi- 
tion " has, in the best possible form, an 
edition of Shakespeare of which he 
may, as an American, be proud. The 
publishers have won for themselves not 
only the credit of being moved with a 
most commendable spirit of enterprise 
in advancing American literary scholar- 
ship, but have proved that they are un- 
excelled as book-makers. The Messrs. 
Ginn, Heath, & Co. have their own 
printing-office, and their typography 
and binding is in the best style of the 
art. 

The School Bnlletin, NewYork : 
Should receive attention from all who 
want the best. 

Editor of The Western, Si. 

Louis : There is no edition so con- 
venient and satisfactory for a private 
library. 

Boston Letter to Springfield 
Union, Oct 24, iSSi : As a whole, 
this is unquestionably entitled to rank 
among the foremost of all the excellent 
editions of Shakespeare yet published. 
Mr. Hudson has brought to the editing 
of it, in addition to his general scholar- 
ship and good judgment, an almost un- 
equalled familiarity with Shakespeare, 
derived from the special and exhaustive 
study of his works, his life, his time, and 
his students, for many years. There is 
nothing extemporaneous in his work ; 
it is well considered, carefully weighed, 
and stated as conscientiously as if he 
were under oath to tell the truth, the 



whole truth, and nothing but the truth 
concerning Shakespeare and his mar- 
vellous writings. The editions he has 
previously produced, both in separate 
plays and entire, have been rehearsals 
for this the crowning achievement of his 
life study. The " Life of Shakespeare " 
has been entirely re-written, as well as 
the introductions to the plays, so as to 
incorporate the latest researches. 

New York Evening- Express : 
Prof. Hudson ranks among the first 
Shakespearian scholars. He has de- 
voted his life to Shakespearian studies, 
and to the literature best calculated to 
explain and illustrate the meaning of 
Shakespeare's marvellous verse. He 
is endowed with critical faculties of a 
high order, sharpened by continuous 
culture, but balanced by an apprecia- 
tiveness and a large common sense 
which keep liim from falling a victim 
to his critical fancies and divinings. 
He keeps a firm foot on facts, on the 
solid ground of knowledge, on the es- 
tablished canons of taste and judg- 
ment, and is always trustworthy, which 
is vastly more than can be said of most 
modern Shakespeare editors and an- 
notators. And these qualities among 
others — we cannot help mentioning 
the tasteful form and typography of the 
volumes — render his edition superior 
to any we have, not excepting that of 
the infallible and immaculate Richard 
Grant White. It is a credit to Ameri- 
can scholarship, and admirably suited 
for educated Shakespearian readers 
and students. 



WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. 



A DISCOURSE 



PELIVEKED OX THE 



HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY 



OK TI^E BIRTH OF 



DANIEL WEBSTER, 



JANUARY i8, 1882. 



The Rev. HENRY N. HUDSON, LL.D. 



-ooX»:JOO- 



BOSTON: 
PUBLISHED BY GINN, HEATH, & CO. 

I «82. 



c 



ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



The study of English Literature has been and still is pursued largely on th« 
historical, philological, critical, and biographical basis. With this object in view 
the following books will be found valuable. 

Thomas Arnold's Manual of English Literature, Historical ani 

Critical. 

Carpenter's Introduction to Anglo-Saxon. (Grammar and Reading. 

Carpenter's English of the XIV. Century. Chancers Prologue am 
Kni gilt's Tale. 

Lounsbury's Chaucer's Parlament of Foules. 

Craik's English of Shakespeare. (Commentary on Julius Ccesar.) 

Many of our best schools, however, are turning their attention more especial! 
to the thought, matter, and style of the author; and for this purpose they requir 
more complete selections. We have, therefore, published in pamphlet .form 

Hudson's Separate Plays of Shakespeare. 

The Merchant of Venice, Julius Ccssar, Hamlet, The Tempest, Macbeth, Hen? 
the Eighth, As You Like It, Henry the Fourth, King Lear, Much Ado About Noti. 
mg, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry the Fifti 
Coriolanus. In paper covers. Price of each, 30 cents. 

Hudson's Pamphlet Sections of Text-Books of Prose and Poetry 

Burke, Webster, Bacon, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Bu7-ns, Addison and Gok 
smith. In paper covers. Price of each, 30 cents. 

Sprague's Six Sketches from Irving's Sketch-Book. With Notes 

Sprague's Milton's Lycidas. With Notes for School use. 
We also bind many of the above in cloth Price, 40 cents. 

Hudson's Text-Book of Poetry. 

From Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burns, Beattie, Golds7nith, and Thomson. Wil 
Notes and Sketches of the Authors' Lives. 

Hudson's Text-Book of Prose. 

From Burke, Webster, and Bacon. With Notes and Sketches of the Authoi 
Lives. 

Hudson's Life, Art, and Characters of Shakespeare. 

Including an Historical Sketch of the Origin and Growth of the Drama : 
England, with Studies in the Poet's Drainatic Architecture, Delineation of Chara 
ter, Humor, Style, and Moral Spirit ; also with Critical Discourses on twenty-fi' 
plays. 

Hudson's School Shakespeare. First, Second, and Third Series. 

Hudson's Classical English Reader. 

Containing selections from Bryant, Burke, Burns, Byron, Carlyle, Colcud^ 
Cowley, Cowper, Dana, Fronde, Gladstone, Goldsmith, Gray, Helps, Herbert, Hookt 
Hume, Irving, Keble, Lamb, Landor, Longfellow, Macaulay, Milton, Peabody, Sco 
Shakespeare, Southey, Spenser, Talfourd, Taylor, Webster; Whittier, Wordswori 
and other standard authors. With Explanatory and Critical Footnotes. 

A Full Descriptive Catalogue mailed on application. 
GINN & HEATH, Publishers, Boston, New York, and Chicago. 



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